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History
International Justice Mission, a faith-based non-profit human rights group, was founded in 1997, although its beginnings stem from founder and CEO Gary Haugen's work during the Rwandan genocide in 1994. Haugen, at the time a lawyer with the United States Department of Justice, was loaned to a United Nations team investigating the Rwandan genocide. On his return to the U.S. from Rwanda, Haugen formed International Justice Mission in the Washington, D.C., area, with a budget of $200,000. In a 2009 profile published in The New Yorker, Samantha Power, who would later serve as United States Ambassador to the United Nations, wrote that Haugen sees "an absence of proper law enforcement" as the world's biggest problem, which IJM seeks to improve. The organization works to compile evidence that is handed over to government authorities to prosecute slave owners and pimps. For its first case, the organization helped lead to the arrest of a rape suspect in Manila, Philippines. In 1998, IJM helped rescue more than 700 people; by 2016, the organization had rescued more than 28,000 victims of abuse globally. In addition to helping clients with legal representation, Haugen decided his organization could make a bigger impact by collaborating with governments to help improve legal systems in developing countries.

Since its founding, IJM has assisted law enforcement conduct rescue operations for girls and women trapped in sex trafficking and sexual violence in Asia, Latin America and Africa. Rescue operations with local law enforcement officials in Cambodia in the early 2000s are among IJM's most well known. International Justice Mission investigators went into brothels in the village of Svay Pak in May 2002 with hidden cameras and took four underage girls to a hotel, where the group's lawyers told the girls they would be taken somewhere safe. The organization handed its evidence over to Cambodian authorities, who rescued 14 more girls a week later. About a week after that, Cambodian police arrested those girls for immigration violations. The next year, IJM went undercover with Dateline NBC. The group's investigation helped lead police to arrest pimps and rescue 37 girls from local brothels. While IJM considered these early rescue missions successes, critics questioned the organization's tactics, saying raids on brothels do not focus on the root causes of child prostitution, have led to the arrests of people not in the sex trade and hindered HIV prevention initiatives.

International Justice Mission expanded its work beyond prevention of sex trafficking and by 2009 its lawyers, social workers and advocates also helped victims whose land had been seized, bonded laborers, and the falsely imprisoned. U.S. News & World Report named International Justice Mission on its 10 Service Groups That Are Making a Difference list in 2010. Under President Barack Obama's administration, the United States Department of State honored Haugen, International Justice Mission's founder and CEO, as a Trafficking in Persons Report Hero Acting to End Modern Slavery in 2012. The State Department said IJM helped nearly 4,000 victims and assisted in the prosecution of 220 offenders between 2006 and 2012.

In December 2011, Google awarded US$11.5 million in grants to combat modern-day slavery. Google donated US$9.8 million for International Justice Mission to lead a coalition focusing on fighting slavery in India, in addition to running advocacy and education programs in the country, and mobilizing Americans. IJM CEO Gary Haugen and Victor Boutros authored The Locust Effect: Why the End of Poverty Requires the End of Violence in 2014, for which the authors won the 2016 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order. Haugen followed up the book with a 19-minute TED talk in Vancouver, Canada, in 2015.

Within 20 years of its founding, International Justice Mission had grown into an organization with a US$51.6 million budget comprising more than 750 employees in 17 field offices in Africa, Latin America, South Asia and Southeast Asia, and five partner offices in Canada, UK, Netherlands, Germany and Australia.

In 2016, Willie Kimani, a Kenyan International Justice Mission lawyer, and two others, including an IJM client, were murdered. Four members of the Kenyan Administrative Police were charged with murder on July 18, 2016; they pleaded not guilty. Haugen denounced the killings as "an intolerable outrage and should serve as an abrupt wake-up call to the blatant injustices committed daily and incessantly against the poor and vulnerable around the world".