Grassroots criminal justice implementation efforts will be given a kick-start across Asia over the next year as the eleven winners of the 2010 JusticeMakers each receive US$5000 seed funding to realize their innovative criminal justice implementation projects.

This year’s competition saw an unprecedented 112 applications received by IBJ, with the winners selected by an expert judging panel comprised of criminal justice leaders from throughout Asia and the United States. Winners included applicants from Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Georgia, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Vietnam, each with their own unique stories behind their passion for justice.

Reading the winners’ applications makes it difficult not to share their enthusiasm for positive change and community empowerment. Inspired by a farmer’s courage in giving evidence against a landowner who had burnt down the farmer’s house in an act of intimidation, Rosselynn Jae de la Cruz (Philippines) is creating a paralegal class to train local women as paralegals, so they may quickly respond to arrests in agrarian communities of the Bondoc Peninsula.

Muhammad Waqas Abid (Pakistan) grew up in very poor community and witnessed human rights violations throughout his childhood. He established Good Thinkers Organization, a grassroots-level NGO that works for the welfare and development of marginalized segments of society in Pakistan. He will use this established network to conduct ten seminars in rural areas of Punjab to educate brick kiln workers and agricultural laborers, those most susceptible to legal rights abuse, about their legal rights.

Not all JusticeMakers projects take an education and awareness-raising strategy. H.M. Harshi Chitrangi Perera (Sri Lanka) will build a systematic and competent pool of legal resources to provide direct legal aid to female pre-trial detainees. She will also compile a study on the state of female prison inmates for publication.

Additionally, in the people’s choice award, members of the online Justicemakers.net community voted in favor of Junaid Khalid Shaikh’s proposal to establish legal and judicial camps in support of human rights to address the problem of lack of awareness about access to justice issues amongst community leaders in Karachi, Pakistan. Junaid’s proposal was rated by an impressive 398 people, and over 4500 online votes were cast in one month by the justicemakers.net community to show their support for their favorite projects.

See the complete list of 2010 JusticeMakers fellows, along with their winning project proposals at www.justicemakers.net/2010fellows.

From all of us at IBJ, we congratulate the winners and thank all the applicants for their refusal to let justice wait.