Vera Chirwa

Vera Mlangazua Chirwa, born May 26, 1932, in Nyasaland, now Malawi, is a Malawian lawyer and human and civil rights activist regarded as her country's first woman lawyer. She co-founded the Nyasaland African Women's League in the early 1950s alongside Rose Chibambo and was a founding member of the Malawi Congress Party in 1959. After opposing the authoritarian rule of President Hastings Kamuzu Banda, she and her husband Orton Chirwa were abducted from Zambia by Malawian security forces on December 24, 1981, tried by a traditional court and sentenced to death in 1983, a sentence later commuted, and she spent twelve years in detention before her release on January 24, 1993, during Malawi's transition to democracy. She went on to found the Malawi Centre for Advice, Research and Education on Rights and to serve, beginning in 2000, as Special Rapporteur on Prisons and Conditions of Detention in Africa for the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights.