Namuezi Fedi

Focus

Namuezi Fedi is Senior Lawyer for the Congo Basin Forest in Africa. She focuses on strengthening forest conservation, creating inclusive protected areas, local communities, indigenous peoples’ and women’s rights, through locally driven solutions, by providing strategic and legal support to civil society organizations, members of the Ministries and Parliament across the States hosting the second lung of this planet.

Experience

Namuezi has worked on protecting vulnerable people’s rights in various regions in the world, within several international organizations such as the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the International Committee of the Red Cross, Lawyers Without Borders and Habitat & Humanism. Most specifically when working with Lawyers Without Borders as expert on access to justice, in collaboration with Bar associations and NGOs in Burundi, Rwanda, the DRC, Uganda and Chad, she supported the development of legal aid clinics and mobile justice clinics to help beneficiaries claim their rights even in remote areas. She developed strategies to strengthen the capacity of national lawyers to assist vulnerable people in court, fight impunity and advocated for the institutionalization of legal aid by organizing multistakeholder Forums on legal aid.

She has developed several innovative ways to use the law to improve vulnerable people’s lives such as a unique Collective Solidarity Group which combines the African “tontine” (collective saving and lending technique) with tailored legal trainings, in partnership with the Brussels Housing Fund, to help discriminated families in Belgium become owners of a decent and affordable home.

Education

She holds an LLM in International Human Rights from the University of Essex, UK, and a Masters in European and International law from the University of Aix-Marseille, France.

I believe in the law as a mediative means to build bridges between the needs of the Forests to regenerate, the needs of the communities and indigenous people to live in harmony on their land, and various economical interests. A peaceful means that can allow everyone to build the sustainable changes our Earth’s critically needs.