 In 2001, he co-founded Justitia Universalis, a non-governmental organisation dedicated to fighting impunity.In the same year, he submitted the cases of Abbassi Madani and Ali Belhadj, the detained leaders of the banned Islamic Salvation Front, to the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention in Geneva, which ruled that both were being detained arbitrarily, since their 1992 trial had failed to comply with international standards.This verdict greatly displeased the Algerian government, which subsequently charged Rachid Mesli with belonging to an "armed terrorist group" operating abroad, issuing an unenforceable arrest warrant.