Introduction

Turkey is currently the largest refugee-hosting state in the world, with approximately 4 million individuals seeking protection in the country from neighboring Syria, as well as other countries of origin including Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran. These refugee populations have a variety of legal needs, ranging from protection-specific assistance while navigating asylum procedures, to other issues that are common to refugees and citizens alike (such as matters relating to family law, and access to basic services like health, education, and legal employment).

1. Under Turkish law, the state-funded legal aid system (Adli Yardim) is tasked with providing free-of-charge legal assistance to both citizens and non-citizens who do not have the means to pay for a lawyer, including foreign nationals subject to asylum and immigration procedures.
2. However, as in many other contexts, the state-funded legal aid system in Turkey is strained by funding and capacity limitations. These challenges are exacerbated when it comes to refugees subject to complicated administrative and judicial procedures, not only due to the massive scale of the population in need, but also because involvement in this field requires considerable specialized expertise on a range of substantive legal issues.
3. A number of non-governmental non-profit associations (NGOs), such as Refugee Rights Turkey, run free-of-charge legal service programs to help address the needs of this growing population. However, such NGO-administered programs are reliant on limited, project-based funding that result in services being strategically targeted to address the most urgent needs. Drawing from the experience of a 2019 pro bono pilot project, which brought together the Refugee Solidarity Network (RSN), Refugee Rights Turkey (RRT), and two Istanbul-based law firms, this paper examines how pro bono partnerships between NGOs and private lawyers from for-profit law firms can generate additional complementary capacity to help address the legal assistance and representation needs of the refugee population in Turkey.

The Refugee Solidarity Network (RSN), a US-based non-profit that works to support refugee protection in the Global South, and Refugee Rights Turkey (RRT), a leading national refugee legal assistance provider and migration and asylum policy actor in Turkey, have been working together since 2015 to help address the most crucial legal information and assistance needs of the refugee population in Turkey, and to expand the supply and quality of legal representation available to refugees. The organizations have long recognized the potential for private lawyers and law firms in Turkey to contribute to refugee protection, and in 2019 initiated a pro bono pilot project in collaboration with two law firms to explore this possibility further, and to establish a pro bono partnership model that could guide and inspire other NGOs and law firms in Turkey to follow suit. This was a pioneering project in the Turkish context, in that it brought pro bono resources to an existing national NGO legal service program for the direct benefit of refugees. The pilot involved a partnership with an international and a national firm, to expand and complement RRT’s existing provision of legal

Pro Bono Practice: Basics and Global Context

The purpose of pro bono legal services is to provide free, high-quality legal assistance and representation to people who face difficulties in accessing legal assistance, often due to economic hardship.4 Pro bono generally denotes legal work performed by lawyers in pursuit of a public cause, as opposed to for-profit economic interests. Critically, pro bono services are provided on a voluntary basis and at no cost to the client, while still adhering to the same standard of quality and professionalism that would be afforded to a paying client.5 Law firms all over the world engage in pro bono work. The most recent edition of the TrustLaw Index included information from 134 law firms in 75 jurisdictions, representing data on about 64,500 attorneys who performed a total of 2.5 million hours of pro bono work around the world in 2015.6 Specifically relevant to this report, while pro bono practice falls along many thematic lines, there has been a substantial increase in pro bono work relating to asylum in recent years.7 Globally, in 2015, “Immigration, Refugees and Asylum” was selected by 41.4% of law firms as a focus area (a substantial increase from the previous two years).

Pro bono partnerships between law firms and NGOs can serve to bolster legal systems and increase capacity on both sides of the partnership, and have fostered access to justice in countries all over the world. Historically, pro bono attorneys in the United States have played a key role in numerous legal battles that have changed the laws and social landscape of the United States, including toward landmark cases against discrimination. Recent examples of this relate to the travel ban litigation, as well as various lawsuits pending against U.S. government immigration policies.9 Although institutionalized pro bono is a more recent development in Europe, the last fifteen years has seen incredible growth in pro bono practice in the region, largely consisting of private law firm-NGO partnerships.10 Asia has also seen an impressive increase in pro bono, with a 40 percent year-on-year increase in pro bono hours performed since 2014, and a rapidly expanding regional pro bono infrastructure.11 Pro bono has also been identified as an avenue for the private sector’s engagement with refugee assistance more broadly, as demonstrated at the recent Global Refugee Forum, where a landmark commitment was made by over 20 public and private legal actors (including law firms and in-house counsel at multinational corporations), who together pledged to commit 125,000 hours per year of pro bono legal support for refugees and stateless people.12 The continued global increase in the use of pro bono to facilitate access to justice, especially for refugee-related issues, suggests that pro bono partnerships could represent an untapped resource to complement current structures to address some of the gaps identified regarding free-of-cost legal services in Turkey.