On 3-4 February 2025, Protect Humanitarians co-organised, with Legal Action Worldwide (LAW), a workshop focused on “Justice and accountability for attacks against humanitarian personnel”.

With 2024 marking the deadliest year on record for humanitarian workers, accountability for victims and survivors remains extremely limited. Humanitarian personnel and organizations targeted by violence continue to face significant barriers to accessing justice.

The 2-day event was attended by 36 humanitarian actors, experts, and legal practitioners from various organisations, universities and institutions. The various plenary, panel and group sessions centered on the following key objectives:

• • Review the current legal framework and identify avenues to hold perpetrators accountable;
  • Examine strategies to enhance legal aid access, especially for local personnel;
  • Highlight how a network of survivors with lived experience and families of humanitarian victims can play a role in justice and accountability mechanisms;
  • Identify steps to support states to investigate and prosecute crimes committed against humanitarian personnel, and report on actions undertaken;
  • Agree on a joint action plan and recommendations;
  • Establishing a collaborative network for advocacy, action, and shared learning, bringing together survivors, experts, legal practitioners, humanitarians and Member States.

This event marked the beginning of a series of engagements aimed at ensuring that justice and accountability for humanitarian personnel remain at the forefront of the international agenda.

“In recent years, there’s been an increasing focus on the importance of justice for victims and survivors and accountability for those who commit crimes. Numbers are increasing and let me be clear, impunity breeds more violence.”

Antonia Mulvey, Founder and Executive Director of Legal Action Worldwide (LAW).

“In this very difficult moment – when aid budgets are shrinking, when international law is under pressure, and when fundamental rights are in retreat – we must act together. Humanitarian aid workers need to be betterprotected. But we also need to amplify the voices of humanitarian survivors and families of victims. We need to be at the center of justice and accountability efforts.”

Olivier Vandecasteele, Founder and Director of Protect Humanitarians.