2024 has been a very busy year! We have shipped 595 boxes of books to 21 organisations in 15 countries and on four continents.
Throughout the year we have had fantastic support from our partners, as well as law firms, barristers’ chambers, in-house lawyers, the courts, law students, legal publishers and law librarians. Huge thanks to everyone who has assisted us this year in our mission.
Altogether, thousands of valuable books have been saved from land fill and shipped to organisations all over the world where they will be used to support judgments, legal research, academic study, the drafting of laws, and increasing access to justice.
To pick just a few highlights: in February, law students at the University of Nottingham collected and packed books for Uganda; the team at the RCJ Library held a successful bake sale in March; in July volunteers from the British and Irish Association of Law Librarians (BIALL) held an online training day for law librarians in Nigeria in association with Africa House London and ROLE UK; books were delivered to organisations in Sierra Leone by the UK Sierra Leone Pro Bono Network in June and October; this autumn, hundreds of books were collected and packed by law students at the Cambridge University Law Society Pro Bono Committee for a university in Ukraine; with the help of a donation of books from De Gruyter Brill, and our Latin American representative Franz Mariscal, we made our first shipment to Peru assisted by the Anglo American in house legal teams in London and Lima, and our first shipment to Ecuador; and a large shipment to Zimbabwe with the help of the Anglo American office in Harare. At the end of year, we shipped donated books to Iraq and Belize.
In April, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, Lord Carnwath CVO and Fiona Rutherford announced the winner of our third law undergraduate essay and the winner, Lauren Davis, spent a week with competition sponsor McDermott Will and Emery in the summer. In September, Elaf Hamid, our shipping coordinator, returned to her studies at the University of Surrey and we welcomed our new shipping coordinator, Haroon Matloob.
We’ve compiled a few highlights from a very busy year for a flavour of what was achieved which you can watch here. Our thanks to the recipients of books in Rwanda, Nigeria, Papua New Guinea, Uganda, Sierra Leone, Peru, Zimbabwe and Ethiopia for sharing their photos with us.
Thank you to our partners, funders, book donors and volunteers for all your hard work, enabling us to achieve so much in 2024. We could not achieve this without the fantastic support we receive from across the legal community.
2025 will be the 20th anniversary of the founding of the ILBF and we will be celebrating throughout the year. We will start the year with the launch of our 2025 essay competition which is sponsored by Brown Rudnick. The competition will be launched on 6th January at 4pm by Baroness Carr, the Lady Chief Justice of England and Wales. The competition is open to all law undergraduates studying in the UK.
All good wishes for the festive season and the new year to come from the trustees, patrons and operating committee.
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