Our Founder
Bhuwan Ribhu
Activist | Advocate | Author
Bhuwan Ribhu is an internationally acclaimed child rights activist. He treats justice less as a cause to champion than a service to deliver, one that has to actually reach a child, on time, or it hasn't worked. That distinction runs through two decades of a career built less on individual victories than on rebuilding the law itself.
It started small. In 2005, as a young lawyer, he took on a loophole that let most child labour continue legally simply because the industry wasn't officially labelled "hazardous", and stayed on it until the definition changed. The lesson was simple fix the word the law hides behind, not just the case in front of you.
That approach scaled with the problem. When India had no legal definition of trafficking, he petitioned the Supreme Court to write one, in 2011. A case he argued two years later made missing-children registration mandatory nationwide, linked to over 100,000 fewer children going missing each year since. His proposals also shaped India's post-Nirbhaya reforms, and in 2024 he successfully argued to strike "child pornography" from Indian law, replacing it with Child Sexual Exploitative and Abuse Material, naming the crime as abuse, not content.
That same willingness to take the harder fight defines his decade-long argument that child marriage is, plainly, child rape, not tradition deserving patience, but a crime the law let hide behind that word. He held that position long before it was a comfortable one to hold, at a time when calling it "custom" was still enough to end the conversation. What has changed since is not the argument, but who is willing to have it; culture is no longer where the discussion stops, but where it starts, and governments and communities that once treated child marriage as untouchable are now organising against it in public. That shift is what will end child marriage within this generation, globally, not as a distant goal but as work already underway. That plan was the PICKET framework, the backbone of India's Bal Vivah Mukt Bharat campaign, adopted soon after by Nepal.
From there, the fight stopped being a national one. Ribhu carried the case for a Child Marriage Free World onto multilateral platforms, the UN Commission on the Status of Women, the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, building a pledge that now spans 99 countries and an estimated 250 million people. It was his call that led the United Nations General Assembly to adopt a resolution establishing 27 November as the International Day for the Elimination of Child, Early and Forced Marriage, placing a fight that started in an Indian courtroom permanently on the world's calendar.
That work is now Just Rights for Children, a network of legal and community partners across India, Nepal, Kenya, the UK, and the US, built so the fight doesn't depend on one person staying in the room. The 2030 target his books point toward hasn't been reached yet. That unfinished distance is the clearest measure of the ambition, not a legacy secured, but a service still being delivered.