Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer has a significant history of providing pro bono legal services to clients including charities, NGOs, the governments of developing nations and marginalised individuals. We are extremely proud of the outcomes our clients achieve for the communities in which we live and work, and the relationships and reputation we have built along the way.
Pro bono work is woven into the fabric of our firm. It’s an opportunity that is not only available to all our lawyers, but is regarded as an essential part of our professional responsibility and treated in exactly the same manner as any other client work.
Because we operate in regions with diverse pro bono cultures, it makes sense to focus our pro bono practice on ways to help strengthen the fundamental principle on which justice is based– the rule of law. We also prioritise matters and projects that focus on social inclusion and capacity building in communities of need. We place enormous emphasis on skills sharing, training and collaboration with our pro bono clients, whether they are well-established global charities, community legal centres, or an innovative thought-leader in community service delivery.
HBT and Herbert Smith Freehills have been working together for many years with Justice Without Borders (JWB), a cross-border non-profit that works in Hong Kong, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines to increase access to justice through legal advocacy.
In Indonesia, JWB has been supporting Indonesian victims of labour exploitation and human trafficking to seek cross-border compensation from their abusers.
In 2020, we helped one of JWB’s clients here with an affidavit for a Singapore court case that had to be translated into Indonesian and notarised here. Despite the challenges of the ongoing pandemic, we helped JWB to fulfil the signing formalities so that the affidavit could be accepted as evidence by the court.
We also assisted JWB in training staff at Indonesia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs on the legal systems of Singapore and Hong Kong. This was to facilitate JWB’s advocacy for Indonesian victims of labour exploitation and human trafficking in those two countries.
HBT has been a proud partner of JWB for many years, and we fully support JWB’s pursuit of justice across the region.
