Pope Francis has erected the Pan-American Committee of Judges for Social Rights and Franciscan Doctrine as an international public association of the faithful to continue its work educating and advocating for respect for human rights, especially of Indigenous and poor people, in courts throughout the Americas.

Announcing his decision recently, the Vatican said the pope also approved the committee’s creation of the Fray Bartolomé de las Casas Institute whose purpose, the pope said, would be to promote research and education on the themes of “social rights, migration and colonialism.”

“In order for a political and economic system to develop healthily,” the pope had told the judges in 2019, “it needs to guarantee that democracy does not exist in name only, but that it can also be shaped into concrete actions that safeguard the dignity of all its inhabitants, according to the mindset of the common good, in an appeal to solidarity and a preferential option for the poor.”

The necessary concrete actions include “the efforts of the highest authorities and, naturally, of judicial powers, in order to bridge the gap between legal recognition and its practice,” the pope had said.

Pope Francis named Roberto Andrés Gallardo, a judge in Buenos Aires, to be the committee’s president. He had served as chairman of the committee since its formation. Ana Inés Algorta Latorre, a federal judge in Porto Alegre, Brazil, was named vice president. Board members come from Colombia, Chile, Peru and the United States, which is represented by Tamila Ipema, who recently retired as a San Diego Superior Court judge.