For years my days were spent inside war crimes. Testimonies no one should have to hear. Exhibits nobody should have to look at twice. And at six o'clock I would get in my car, sit in traffic, stop at the store, and make dinner.
I thought it was a Hague thing. Then I served in Arusha. Then Freetown. Then Phnom Penh. Four international tribunals, three continents, then 16 more years in post-conflict justice, anti-trafficking, and court reform across 20 countries. One constant: nobody ever asked how we carried it. The institutions never built the means to find out, so even the people who wanted to ask it couldn't.
Then something genuinely new has happened. In July 2024, judicial leaders meeting in the South Pacific islands nation of Nauru adopted the Nauru Declaration on Judicial Wellbeing. On March 4, 2025, the UN General Assembly adopted resolution A/RES/79/266 by 160 votes to one, proclaiming July 25 the International Day for Judicial Wellbeing. On November 14, 2025, the Consultative Council of European Judges adopted Opinion No. 28, holding that judges' wellbeing is an essential prerequisite for judicial independence, impartiality, quality and efficiency, and the rule of law.
I have been part of this. In 2022, I organized a wellness session for magistrates in Belize, asked staff how they were doing in corridors and over coffee, but we never designed a program that made the asking somebody's job.
Now the question is finally being asked. And in November 2026, the conversation will reach the Caribbean.
The forgotten staff
Underneath it all sits one body of evidence: a 2022 report by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime's Global Judicial Integrity Network on a survey of 758 judges and other members of the judiciary in 102 countries. Its findings are stark: over 92% report stress from the work, over 83% say their court system does not support their wellbeing, and over 69% say mental health remains taboo.
Judges and magistrates made up 80.9% of the respondents. Court staff made up 14%. Their answers did not differ significantly from the judges', the report says, and it does not mention them again. Every finding is presented as a finding about judges, which the sample allowed.
So is everything built on top of it. The Nauru Declaration does not mention staff at all, except once, as the court management that must create working conditions conducive to judicial wellbeing. The Council of Europe's Opinion mentions them once, in a footnote. In July, Justice Rangajeeva Wimalasena, who initiated the International Day for Judicial Well-being, published a UN brief surveying judicial stress across several countries. Court staff appear in it once, as a source of the judges' stress.
The Caribbean has gone the furthest in naming staff. On November 22, 2024, in Bermuda, the Caribbean Association of Judicial Officers adopted a Statement on the Wellbeing of Judicial Officers and Judiciary Staff. Five of its nine affirmations name both groups together. It calls for wellbeing policies, continuous research, and managers who monitor and evaluate. The CAJO's report on its 2025 survey, published with the Caribbean Association of Women Judges in July 2026, recommends prioritizing the wellbeing of judiciary staff and notes that 73.4% of respondents strongly agreed it should be given the highest priority. That survey went to judicial officers, and 125 of its 128 respondents were.
The missing trauma
But read the instrument. Its stressors are workloads, resources, technology, buildings, and workplace culture. Search the full text, and the words vicarious, secondary trauma, exhibit, interpreter, and registry do not appear. Neither does duty of care. The content of the work, what is in the file and what atrocity crimes witnesses say, is not in that questionnaire at all. Nor is it in UNODC's. Its list of what contributes to stress runs to 15 items, from workload to remuneration to media pressure. Exposure to the material is not one of them.
CAJO knows the word though. In August 2025, it published a video in which a clinical psychologist tells every person working in the court system that they are at high risk of secondary trauma, judicial officers and staff alike, and prescribes debriefing after traumatic matters for the whole court. Yet the survey the association had closed weeks earlier contained no question about it. The report it published a year later does not use the term, and its recommendation for an employee assistance program covers judicial officers and their immediate families, but not court staff.
In July, marking the UN Day for the first time, Namibia's Chief Justice named support staff alongside judicial officers and said individual resilience cannot indefinitely compensate for heavy workloads and inadequate support. That is the argument, and it was a speech. But no judiciary has yet measured what its staff carries. The Philippines comes closest: Its Supreme Court has opened mental health units for every court employee and is preparing a self-assessment tool for staff, after building one for judges first. A self-test tells each person how they are doing. It does not tell the institution how many of its staff are struggling, which is the number a court needs before it can act.
Duty of care
"They are well paid," one argument goes. It fails on its own terms.
At international tribunals, nationally recruited staff work on shorter contracts and different entitlements from the internationals beside them, live in the country where the crimes happened rather than flying home from it, and are the first cut when budgets contract.
A salary does not buy a duty of care. A court officer under UN staff rules may not disclose non-public information to anyone, and a therapist's privilege binds the therapist, not the patient. Much of what does the damage is sealed, closed-session, or protected. The person can describe the distress. Often they cannot describe what caused it. A clinical psychologist who has served Caribbean courts for years says the same in CAJO's own video: you do not give the details of the case; you talk about the impact on you.
Paying for your own care is managing it alone, and that is what a duty of care exists to replace. The Caribbean report itself calls the institution's response a duty owed to judicial officers, judiciary staff, and the public at large. Nor is the obligation theoretical. In 2022, Australia's High Court held the State of Victoria liable for the psychiatric injury of a solicitor in the Office of Public Prosecutions on child sexual offense cases, because her employer saw the signs and did not act, including by moving her to other work.
However, no one can bring that claim against an international tribunal; immunity sees to it, which is exactly why the obligation has to be built into the institution. It is the one workplace where it cannot be enforced from outside. None of this is an accident of individual weakness. It is what an institution produces when it measures nobody, has no written policy or record of what its people are exposed to, and hires the most exposed on the shortest contracts.
“Duty of care” is not my phrase. It came from a former colleague, Petty Mloka, who worked in human resources at the Special Court for Sierra Leone during the years I ran court management there, advising on which UN rules and regulations applied to the Court. Humanitarian work may be noble, she said, but nobility does not protect people from psychological harm, and processing what they carry cannot remain the worker's private responsibility. It must be built into the duty of care.
Nor can this be answered by hiring differently. George Bonanno's research on resilience found the predictors so weak that no questionnaire reliably identifies in advance who will withstand exposure and who will not. You cannot screen for it. The only thing that works is watching everyone who is exposed.
It costs justice
This is not a welfare argument. The movement's own founding claim is that wellbeing is a justice issue, and it has already proved that case for judges.
Judges told UNODC that poor wellbeing damages the efficiency of justice and court administration (80%) and the quality of decisions and judgments (68%). Caribbean data shows the trend moving in the wrong direction fast. Between 2021 and 2025, the share of judicial officers rating the impact of stress on delivering judgments at 3 or higher on a five-point scale rose from 32 to roughly 54%; on managing cases from around 40 to 64%; on hearing cases from around 25 to 50%. The report names what that costs: poor case management, inapt decisions, delayed or poorly reasoned judgments, and the mistreatment of court staff and court users. The movement ties it all to integrity under Article 11 of the Convention against Corruption, because a judge under strain is a judge at risk.
Run the same logic one floor down, and the risk is not smaller. The registry holds the exhibits, the sealed material, the protected witness list, and the transcript the judgment will rest on. We know the exposure is the same. The registry handles what the judge reads, and more of it. We know from the judges' own data that this kind of strain degrades the work, and the one study that has included court staff – 122 U.S. federal court personnel in 2024 – found the same pattern. What we do not know is how much, or where it has already cost a verdict, because no one has counted. That is not a gap in the case. It is the case.
What it looks like from the floor is this. An interpreter hears the testimony once, holds it, and says it again in the first person, so that every atrocity in the record passes through her twice. How often the strain surfaces quietly, in a disclosure missed or an exhibit filed wrong, no one has asked. Trials do not usually collapse because a judge was tired. They collapse on the record.
In April I began writing about this in public. Prosecutors, investigators, and survivors wrote back, some openly and some privately. The accounts here are from that record, with permission.
A colleague of mine spent months on testimonies about the killing of children. Then she became pregnant and kept sitting with the same evidence, because nobody suggested anything else. No one said: not this, not now. No one moved her to a different part of the case, or gave her something else entirely. Her daughter was born early. When the baby was placed in her arms, all she could see were the dead children she had been listening to, she said.
For years she carried that as her own failure, something she had not been strong enough for. The reframing, when it finally came, came from a conversation with somebody else who had been there. Not from anything the institution built, because the institution had built nothing. Nobody had to provide her with a therapist.
Somebody should have looked at what she was working on and given her something else. That costs nothing. It is a decision about who does what this week. It was never made because no one was responsible for making it, and no instrument existed that would have flagged the need.
So what would it take? Less than the movement thinks.
How to fix it
In November, judicial leaders from around the world meet in Grand Cayman under the theme of institutional responsibility. The three-day program runs to 19 sessions. Not one is about what the material does to the people who handle it, and not one is about the staff. That is what the field looks like from the registry floor.
Two things would change it, and neither is expensive.
The first is to count the staff. The judicial wellbeing survey that already exists has 107 questions across twelve themes; the second of them is exposure to distressing content, on a free online platform that records nothing that identifies a respondent. Nothing has to be written or funded. It just has to be sent to the people below the bench. The honest answer to how much this exposure costs is that no one has asked, and the instrument that would ask already exists. Any judiciary could do that internally with one letter from its Chief Justice, tomorrow.
The second costs even less. The Commentary to the Nauru Declaration, the text that will tell judiciaries what the seven principles mean in practice, is being drafted now. One sentence in it, saying that judicial wellbeing includes the judiciary staff who handle the same material, would do more than any survey. The people drafting it will be in Grand Cayman in November. The sentence can be written anywhere.
Two new institutions have the chance to get this right from day one. The Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine is entering its skeleton phase in The Hague; its advance team is designing the tribunal's court management system this year. The Special Tribunal for The Gambia, approved by ECOWAS in December 2024, is still seeking the roughly 60 million dollars it says it needs but it already has a prosecutor on the ground. Neither has logged an exhibit yet. Duty of care can be written into their staff rules now, or retrofitted later at a price nobody will pay.
The judiciary has spent two years establishing that the people who deliver justice are part of how justice is delivered. That principle does not stop at the bench. It has simply never been asked to go any further.
Krystal K. Thompson served at four international criminal tribunals, including as Chief of Court Management of the Special Court for Sierra Leone and UN Focal Point for Women at the Khmer Rouge tribunal. She is Founder and Principal Consultant of Global Empowerment Direct in Maastricht and author of The Gambia's Rule of Law Roadmap.
