Virtual Engagement Series

On January 3, 2026, the United States military conducted a “large-scale strike” against Venezuela that culminated in removing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores from the country and transporting them to the U.S., where they face criminal charges.

These actions have plunged Venezuela into a climate of even more widespread fear and distrust, with citizens wary of surveillance, unsure about what comes next, and with few reliable sources of information to help them make decisions.

In this session, speakers discussed the immediate aftermath of these events and their implications for media freedom, the economy, and civil society. By tracing Venezuela’s political history and outlining its challenging information ecosystem, our speakers offered context, informed perspectives, and guidance for the international community on how to help uphold civil society during this period of uncertainty.

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Governments around the world are deploying increasingly restrictive regulations and policies. This new legislation is often framed as ordinary regulations but can quickly become an existential threat to civic space, giving governments another way to restrict civil society’s work. Civil society organizations (CSOs) everywhere are confronting a growing set of bureaucratic hurdles, barriers to funding, sanctions, and many other challenges, forcing many organizations to reduce their operations or shut down completely.

In this session, we heard diverse perspectives on the tactics governments use to turn regulatory legislation into a tool to silence dissenting voices and repress important advocacy work, including timely examples from Nigeria and Peru.

Speakers discussed the importance of pro bono work and solidarity to push back against restrictions, and shared valuable insights into actionable steps to mitigate the threats posed by these types of laws.

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Human rights and the environment are fundamentally linked. The Vance Center’s Environment Program works at the intersection of these two spheres, focused on environmental justice and human rights.

For more than a decade, the Program has worked with the office of the UN Special Rapporteur (UNSR) on the human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment to help a series of UNSRs advance their mandate.

From 2012 to 2022, we coordinated a multi-year global survey to determine which UN member states recognize a human right to a healthy environment in their domestic laws. Our research eventually covered all 193 UN Member States, and contributed to the UNSR’s successful advocacy to formalize the UN’s recognition of the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment.

Since the UN General Assembly passed a resolution recognizing this right in July 2022, we have continued working with the mandate to uphold this right at national and international levels. We have also taken on other projects for the UNSR’s office focused on specific themes or issues, most recently related to human rights and ocean governance.

In this session, the current and previous UNSR on the human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment joined us to share stories and perspectives from their work. As governments across the globe are rolling back environmental safeguards and policies, they also provided insights and advice on how organizations like the Vance Center, our NGO clients, and individuals can keep pushing for progress through cross-sector collaboration.

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Women around the world face numerous challenges that hinder their hiring, advancement, and retention in the workplace — from sexual harassment and pay disparities to implicit bias and inequitable hiring practices. While there has been meaningful progress in many areas, significant barriers continue limiting women’s opportunities and impact their experiences at work.

The Vance Center addresses these barriers through our broad efforts to strengthen the legal profession, initiatives like Women in the Profession and the Advancing Women in the Workplace mentorship program, and pro bono projects that protect and advance women’s rights. We are committed to a holistic approach to addressing gender biases in laws, organizational structures, and individual opinions.

In November 2024, the Vance Center, Africa End Sexual Harassment Initiative (AESHI) and the Pan African Lawyers Union (PALU) produced a joint report, “Mapping Legal Protections against Workplace Sexual Harassment in Africa.” The first-of-its-kind report analyzed existing legislative protections addressing sexual harassment in 22 jurisdictions across Africa and offered recommendations for a regional approach to comprehensive sexual harassment legislative frameworks.

In this session, we spoke with two partners, including one of the report’s co-authors, about their work confronting gender-based challenges in the workplace across sub-Saharan Africa and how to chart the path forward.

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In July 2022, the founder and former editor of independent Guatemalan newspaper elPeriódico, José Rubén Zamora Marroquín, was arrested and charged with financial crimes. ElPeriódico had long reported on corruption cases involving Guatemalan politicians and business leaders, and Mr. Zamora had faced serious threats for decades as a result of his investigative reporting.

His arrest and criminal trial have drawn international concern about the criminalization of journalists and the broader efforts to intimidate and silence those exposing government corruption, in Guatemala and across the region. In October 2024, after more than 800 days in prison, an appeals court granted Mr. Zamora provisional release to house arrest while his trial continues.

The Vance Center has represented Mr. Zamora in proceedings before regional and international human rights bodies, including the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, since fall 2022. We have joined numerous other organizations in publicly condemning flaws and delays in the trial proceedings through public statements, amicus brief filings, and other advocacy efforts.

As threats to press freedom intensify across the Americas and around the world, we had the opportunity to speak with Mr. Zamora about the status of his case, his time under house arrest, evolving threats to press freedom, and the future of anti-corruption efforts in Guatemala.

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Over the past two decades, thousands of local newspapers across the U.S. have ended up in the hands of media conglomerates or private equity firms, which have often drained them of resources or shuttered them all together. Thousands of journalists lost jobs, the consolidation of newspapers accelerated, and “news deserts” – localities without a single source of local independent reporting – spread rapidly.

But the situation isn’t hopeless. As traditional outlets dimmed their lights, hundreds of agile, independent small news organizations have emerged to fill some of those gaps. Their audiences are their local communities and neighbors, and their leadership and editorial angles are as diverse as the communities they serve. The common thread is a universal need for legal advice and services to help these outlets survive and grow, especially as they face evolving threats to press freedom and restrictive conditions.

The Vance Center launched its Lawyers for Reporters program more than five years ago to provide essential legal services on a pro bono basis to local, mission-driven journalism organizations across the United States.

We spoke with Sally Kestin of the Asheville Watchdog, our very first LFR client, about the Watchdog’s formation, critical reporting, and the legal support they’ve received from Lawyers for Reporters.

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The rule of law is a crucial foundation for a vibrant civil society, enabling people to rely on the legal system to ensure their rights and understand and participate in civic life.

For over a decade, the Vance Center has made judicial independence a focal point of our work across the Americas. We’ve helped equip justice operators with tools to push back against corruption and attacks on their independence and protect themselves and their colleagues from related threats.

We work with independent associations of judges to pursue preventative and responsive measures to address threats to judicial independence and connect national, regional, and international members of the legal, justice, and civil society sectors working in this space to strengthen accountability and transparency initiatives, improve mechanisms for seeking solutions, and develop support networks to address current and future challenges.

Through these efforts, we’ve had the privilege of working regularly with the office of the UN Special Rapporteur on the Independence of Judges and Lawyers through multiple mandates.

We were honored to have the current UN Special Rapporteur, Margaret Satterthwaite, join us to share more about her current priorities and emerging trends in her work.

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The lack of gender equity is a significant barrier in the legal profession, hindering recruitment, advancement, retention, and overall job satisfaction for women worldwide. While the gender balance in law firms has gradually improved in recent years, global statistics still show stark discrepancies.

In 2006, an initiative of the New York City Bar Association produced a report on best practices to address the unequal gender representation of lawyers in senior positions within law firms. Spurred into action by the report, members of the Vance Center Committee started working with partners in our international pro bono network to open dialogues on this issue at the regional level. The conversations led to hosting conferences across Latin America to discuss how to tailor these best practices to address the specific challenges faced by women in different countries.

What started as a series of discussions has grown into our Women in Profession (WIP) Program. WIP now comprises 19 national chapters in Latin America, four in Sub-Saharan Africa, and one in the United States, reflecting the Vance Center’s continued commitment to promoting gender equity in the legal profession worldwide.

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Across the globe, Indigenous communities and other frontline environmental rights defenders are fighting to protect land rights, ensure climate justice, and prevent abuses that undermine the universal right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment – often at the hands of corrupt entities seeking capital gains.

Our client Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN) International is at the forefront of global efforts to engage and support women in policy and advocacy work to address the climate crisis. At WECAN’s request, the Vance Center, with pro bono legal support from firms including Baker McKenzie, has created toolkits, manuals, and workshops focused on international environmental and human rights law.

These resources help the women leaders across WECAN’s network better understand their rights and engage in environmental rights defense and advocacy on key issues like the Escazú Agreement, a landmark regional treaty on environmental matters in Latin America and the Caribbean.

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The U.S. government’s “zero tolerance” immigration enforcement policy introduced in 2018 applied family separation as a deterrent to undocumented children and families seeking asylum.

Using existing relationships with the legal community in Latin America, the Vance Center quickly responded by launching the Keep Families Together (KFT) initiative. Since then, we have continued galvanizing lawyers worldwide to align with U.S. legal service providers working to protect migrants and asylum seekers. Through KFT’s international network of lawyers, U.S. organizations receive pro bono legal services from law firms in their clients’ home countries, gaining access to supporting documents and materials that are critical for their clients’ applications and cases. 

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