2025 Global Litigation Report

This report provides highlights of global litigation work carried out by the Open Society Justice Initiative in 2024—a year of significant organizational change for the Justice Initiative and for the Open Society Foundations as a whole. It includes summaries of major cases in four major areas of litigation that seek to advance the vision of a world of justice, equity, and rights:

• Climate Justice — Over the past two years, we were deeply involved in three major international cases challenging governments to do more to address the climate crisis – at the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, which ruled that climate-related obligations are legally binding on states, and at the International Court of Justice and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, where we hope for similarly consequential pronouncements to come.
  
  
• International Crimes — A few months before the fall of Assad’s regime in Syria, we worked with partners to help secure the first-ever arrest warrant issued by a national tribunal (in France) for a head of state for the use of chemical weapons on his own civilian population.
  
  
• Gender Persecution — After three years of legal argument and advocacy by the Justice Initiative and others, this past September, four states announced their intention to hold the Taliban accountable for their egregious abuses of the rights of women and girls in Afghanistan, which could lead to a landmark case before the International Court of Justice.
  
  
• Social Media Platform Accountability — And this January, on behalf of a courageous Rohingya whistleblower, we filed a complaint with the US Securities and Exchange Commission jointly with partners arguing that Meta misrepresented to investors Facebook’s role in contributing to fueling the atrocities against the Rohingya in 2017.