Exiled lawyer wins Vera Chirwa human rights award
Human rights lawyer and Zimbabwe Exiles Forum (ZEF) executive director Gabriel Shumba has won the 2009 Vera Chirwa Prize offered every year by the Centre for Human Rights at the University of Pretoria in South Africa.
The Vera Chirwa Human Rights Award is offered to alumni of the Master of Laws in Human Rights and Democratisation in Africa “who best epitomises the true African human rights lawyer” and who would have “made an outstanding contribution to the protection and promotion of human rights in Africa.”
Shumba becomes the third recipient of the prize and would be presented with the award on Thursday.
A Zimbabwean human rights defender, Shumba was brutally tortured and forced to flee his homeland in 2003. He subsequently founded ZEF in South Africa, an organisation that has been documenting and litigating rights abuses of those in exile, as well as generally championing the cause for a democratic Zimbabwe.
“It is a singular honour to receive the Vera Chirwa Human Rights Award on International Human Rights Day tomorrow (Thursday), especially as the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Ms. Navi Pillay (a South African national), will be gracing the event. I am humbled,” Shumba said on Wednesday.
The award is named after Malawian lawyer Vera Chirwa (pictured)
, who was jailed in Malawi alongside her late husband Orton Chirwa for treason for 12 years by the repressive and autocratic government of Hastings Kamuzu Banda.
On 9 June 1983, she escaped execution as a result of international pressure, and was only released from prison shortly after her husband’s death in custody.
Both the Chirwas, from their exile in Tanzania, had been staunch advocates of democracy in their country. Vera Chirwa has continued to carry the human rights campaign torch regionally and internationally.–APA
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