Summary: Eleanor Thompson is a public interest lawyer in Sierra Leone who helps people use their power and innovative solutions to provide redress to the social injustices they face., Thompson worked with former child soldiers on their psychosocial recuperation through creative arts and reintegration as well as literacy and development of numeracy skills. Other lawyers are hesitant to do what she does because they fear hostile responses and other negative consequences, but Thompson continues to offer legal services to those who need it.

Profile: Eleanor Thompson holds a Bachelor’s degree in Government and African Studies from Harvard University and a Juris Doctor degree from American University–Washington College of Law. She is the founder of Citizen’s Barry, a nonprofit organisation that promotes civic empowerment and civic engagement to promote social justice in Sierra Leone. She also does pro bono work assisting communities in knowing and applying laws to protect their land rights and environment. When she gets involved, she promotes fairer and more favourable terms for the communities affected; many of these outcomes help prevent land-based conflicts between communities and investors.

Thompson formerly worked for the Africa Regional Office of the Open Society Foundations and Namati. She has worked extensively on international justice, the African Regional human rights system, justice sector reform, juvenile justice, and youth civic engagement issues. She also works for Advocaid, an organisation involved with girls and women unfairly caught up in Sierra Leone’s legal system.

For close to two decades, Thompson’s work has focused on addressing systemic legal and socioeconomic injustices faced by Sierra Leoneans, other Africans, and Black American communities, stemming from colonial or anti-Black legacies. Her desire to use the law as a vehicle to address social injustices was sparked by a disturbing adolescent encounter with a child soldier in Sierra Leone in the1990s, which spurred her efforts at community, national, and international levels toward addressing human rights violations, socioeconomic inequalities, and international crimes.

In the United States, Thompson’s research and advocacy briefs on juvenile arrest inclinations and youth offender demographics in Washington, D.C., were heard by legislators with oversight of the D.C. police and led to incremental juvenile justice policy changes. In Uganda, she worked with former child soldiers, despite the risks that comes with that. She also supported global civil efforts to bring to justice perpetrators of international crimes involving children.

In contributing toward building the jurisprudence of international rights law and Sierra Leone’s legal system, Thompson works closely with the ECOWAS Community Court of Justice, litigating human rights violations within Sierra Leone. She has won landmark cases against Sierra Leone; a few years ago, she won a case on behalf of Mohamed Morlu, a student at the University of Njala in the South of Sierra Leone, who was injured during a police crackdown at a protest organised by students to represent their dissatisfaction to the Ministry of Tertiary Education and the University Authorities. This was against the backdrop of a four-month lecturers’ strike in March 2017, and judgment was entered on behalf of Morlu in 2024, seven years since the incident occurred.

Thompson’s work didn’t stop there; she has also represented Advocaid at the ECOWAS Court of Justice, where she successfully challenged Sierra Leone’s discriminatory loitering laws. These laws criminalised loitering, disproportionately affecting the poor and marginalized, including women who reported abuses of coerced non-consensual sex by police officers. Two years later, the ECOWAS Court of Justice ruled that Sierra Leone’s loitering laws violated the rights to equality, non-discrimination, and freedom of movement. The court also recommended reforms to the country’s loitering law.

Thompson is one of the drafters of both the Customary Land Right Act of 2022 and the National Land Commission Act of 2022. Both laws address the age-old problems that hover around land disputes, which range from protecting women to putting an end to discrimination. One law that existed against the Krios forbade them from owning land in the province; it was successfully repealed by the National Land Commission Act of 2022.

As a human rights litigator, Eleanor Thompson has represented public interest plaintiffs before regional human rights courts to seek accountability and redress for victims of police shootings, and to overturn colonial-era loitering laws used to disproportionately target the poor. She says, “I have been threatened for standing up for justice and human rights on behalf of my fellow citizens, but that has not stopped me from carrying out my duties, and I will continue my efforts as long as I live.”