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Nana Oye Lithur, an alumna of the Centre for Human Rights, was recently appointed as the Cabinet Minister for Gender, Children and Social Protection in Ghana. In 2001, Nana graduated from the LLM in Human Rights and Democratisation in Africa.

In 2007, she received the prestigious Vera Chirwa Award for her human rights advocacy on the continent. Instituted in 2006, on the occasion of the Centre being awarded the UNESCO Prize for Human Rights Education, the Vera Chirwa Human Rights Award is named after Vera Chirwa, a lawyer and human rights activist who fought for independence, multi-party democracy and was saved in extremis from execution in Malawi.

Prior to her appointment as cabinet minister, Nana was a human rights activist and led several-fact finding missions to investigate human rights violations in Ghana. She is the executive Director of Human Rights Advocacy Centre which has helped poor people in accessing justice. She was the national secretary of the International Federation of Women Lawyers (FIDA- Ghana) and also honorary legal advisor of the Ghana Red Cross Society. Nana worked for many years as the Regional Coordinator (Africa Office) for the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI). In 2004, she was a lead consultant that drafted the human rights section for Ghana’s NEPAD/Africa Peer Review Mechanism Report. She drafted the access to justice OSI/AFRIMAP Report on Ghana and was appointed as a Millennium Development Goal 3 torch bearer by the Danish Government in 2008. In 2011, Nana was selected by the Commonwealth Secretary General to be part of the Commonwealth Observer Group for the Guyana national and regional elections in November 2011.

Nana’s appointment as the Minister of Gender, Children and Social Protection in Ghana comes as a breath of fresh air to the course of human rights advocacy in Ghana. The Centre for Human Rights congratulates her on this appointment and wishes her a pleasant stay in office.