Protective Justice is CLTC’s practice of building and sustaining accountability during conflict and not waiting for a political transition that may never arrive, and not replacing existing community structures with new external ones that can be captured or dismantled just as easily.

Justice cannot only address the harm of conflict after the fact. It must also engage, in real time, with the power and resource dominance that produced the violence in the first place, such as land, power, and control that often remain unresolved long after formal peace processes conclude.

In Ukraine, this meant CLTC organising workshops in-country on sustaining the ethics of legal practice during the conflict. In Myanmar and South Sudan, no political transition has arrived at all. Protective Justice is built for exactly these conditions, where waiting is not an option.

This work also shapes what comes after. When a transitional justice process does eventually begin, the communities and victims who held the ground during conflict are the ones best placed to say who should be centred in building it, carrying their voice, agency, and power into a process that too often overlooks them.