Haugen knows that the mission’s religious identity is discomfiting to non-Christians, but he says that he doesn’t have the strength to do the work without a religious foundation. “I don’t know how to do it another way,” he told me. His insistence on hiring only Christians can feel discriminatory. Aryeh Neier, a founder of Human Rights Watch and the current president of the Open Society Institute, criticizes the requirement. “If you are unwilling to have diversity in your own institution, you betray an unwillingness to allow diversity among those you are attempting to assist,” he told me. “If it is objectionable to limit employment by reasons of race, I think it is comparably objectionable to limit by reason of religion. By all means, recruit Christians, but why exclude others?

The Enforcer: A Christian Lawyer’s Global Crusade [a profile of International Justice Mission], by Samantha Power in the New Yorker.

I don’t have time to respond to Mr. Neier’s assertion in full, but suffice it to say it’s utterly ridiculous. IJM’s mission is not a simplistic, temporal goal, but rather a spiritually and religiously-based goal operating out of an explicitly Christian worldview. Likening religious “discrimination” (a poor word choice due to its negative baggage) to racial discrimination in this situation is insidious and wrong.

Holly Burkhalter, who became the mission’s vice-president for government relations after spending two decades at Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights, said, “We are learning as we go. It is true that our first order of business is to rescue the little ones and punish their traffickers. But our goal is also to do no harm, and we have to take into account that the police are cruel and horrible to the sex workers. Having said that, I wish our critics would ask, ‘What are the consequences of saying the police can never get involved when a brothel owner traffics an eleven-year-old?’ Sex-worker unions aren’t an alternative to the rule of law.

In 1994, Haugen took a short leave to direct the United Nations’ investigation of genocide in Rwanda, gathering the preliminary evidence needed in order to set up a war-crimes tribunal…He took down the testimony of a father who saw his three small children hacked to death with machetes. At one massacre site, Haugen rolled back the decaying body of a woman and found the corpse of her child beneath her. Six weeks later, after returning home, Haugen felt disoriented. In church, his mind drifted into calculations of how long it would take a machete-wielding gang to wipe out the congregation. Although the Salvation Army, World Vision, and other Christian organizations fed the hungry and sheltered the homeless, no Christian organization that he knew of had heeded the Bible’s appeals for justice (“Break the arm of the wicked and evil man; call him to account for his wickedness that would not be found out”). He resolved that Christians serving God had to do more than pray for the victims of cruelty; they had to use the law to help rescue them. “This is not a God who offers sympathy, best wishes,” he later wrote. “This is a God who wants evildoers brought to account and vulnerable people protected—here and now!”

In 1985, after graduating, he travelled to South Africa. He served as an intern for Michael Cassidy, who, along with Desmond Tutu, ran the National Initiative for Reconciliation, a church-based effort aimed at ending apartheid. Three days after Haugen arrived in a black township, the South African regime declared martial law. He saw priests locked up, blacks beaten. Security forces detained him for attending a multiracial church service without permission. “What struck me was that in a country just utterly caged by fear—where whites were terrified, blacks were terrified, where anybody who tried to do the right thing was going to get crushed—I got to be with these Christians who had the most surprising absence of fear. They just did the right thing.” He went on, “I came to believe that they lived that way because they actually believed that what Jesus said was true. And I found that, to the extent that I acted as if I believed what Jesus said was true, I lived without fear.

Haugen has great respect for activists at advocacy organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, but he prefers to recruit government prosecutors, defense lawyers, and corporate lawyers who have extensive casework experience. “The circumstances afford no generosity for those who bring only good intentions, the best of motives or the most tender of hearts,” he has argued. “Without a fierce commitment to the sharpest standards in operational and tactical excellence, we do not honor God.

Haugen is not that easy to pigeonhole. He is fiercely critical of Christians whose moral rhetoric is not backed up with action. He does not speak a foreign language, but he is proud that ninety per cent of the mission’s international staff are nationals of the countries where they work. And though he insists that the mission hire only Christian lawyers, investigators, and administrators—the group’s Web site asks job applicants to include “a statement of faith,” in which they describe their “spiritual disciplines” and their place of worship—the mission takes cases without inquiring about the creed of the potential client.

Prayers help. Prayers and a lawyer help more.

In the West, the cause of public justice suffers from what Haugen calls a “constituency gap.” Liberal activists who have promoted the rights of the poor often feel ambivalent about police, prosecutors, and jail wardens, who have long been agents of oppression. Conservatives, meanwhile, have traditionally been skeptical about providing assistance to foreign governments, unless America’s vital interests are at stake. And Westerners across the political spectrum have only a vague sense of the breakdown of legal systems in poor countries—as Haugen puts it, the rule of law is “the invisible oxygen we breathe at home.” He says, “The people who care about injustice don’t tend to spend a lot of time in courtrooms or police stations. We tend to use words like ‘corrupt’ and give up on these places.

Many of the systemic flaws are due less to corruption than to judicial overload. According to the U.N.D.P. report, India has eleven judges for every million people, and more than twenty million legal cases pending. (The International Centre for Prison Studies found that nearly seventy per cent of the detainees in Indian prisons have never been convicted of any crime.) Some Indian civil cases take more than twenty years to reach court.