For years at the tribunal in The Hague, my days were spent inside genocide.

Testimony about Srebrenica. Exhibits nobody should have to look at twice. We turned around transcripts in 24 hours because justice could not wait.

And then at six o’clock I jumped in my car, drove home with everyone else, and made dinner.

I thought it was a Hague thing. Then I served in Arusha, where the testimony was Rwanda’s. Then Freetown, where the war had happened just outside the courtroom. Then Phnom Penh, where the defendants were in their eighties, elderly men answering for the Khmer Rouge half a lifetime later. Four tribunals, three continents, one constant: nobody ever asked how we carried it.

In 25 years, across courts, ministries, and missions on three continents, no institution I served treated what the work cost its people as an institutional question. Wellness was the word institutions reached for, when they reached at all. The question was structural. There were counselors for witnesses, as there should be, and yes, here and there a welfare officer for staff. But there was no framework, no policy, and no one measuring what years inside the testimony did to the people who carried it.

I watched brilliant people leave quietly. Not in scandal, not in burnout headlines. They just stopped. A resignation letter, a farewell drink, and another one gone. We always said the same thing: they needed a change. We never said from what.

And it was not just the tribunals. I spent the years after in anti-trafficking work across Southeast Asia, in gender-based violence programs, and in criminal justice reform from Myanmar to Belize, working to move these cases faster through systems so survivors could be heard. And none of it got lighter with practice. The same pattern was everywhere: in ministries, in missions, in development programs, anywhere the work is heavy and the institution treats the weight as the price of admission. You signed up for hard work. You knew what this was. Ambition makes it worse, because the ones who care most are the ones who stay longest in the rooms that cost the most.

I did not have language for this when I was in it. I was too busy trying to get things done, which is its own way of not looking.

In September, I will stand before a room of legal scholars at the University of Lucerne and make this argument properly. It has taken me 25 years to write, and most of those years I did not know I was writing it.

But before Lucerne, I want to ask the people here, because many of you have carried versions of this in courts, missions, hospitals, ministries, and businesses.

What has this work cost you, or the people around you? And did anyone ever name it?

#25YearsIn #JudicialWellbeing #HumanSustainability #RuleOfLaw #InternationalJustice