David Mendes came to Oslo to attend the Human Rights Defenders seminar co-hosted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Norwegian Centre for Human Rights, a research unit under the Faculty of Law at the University of Oslo, on the 26 and 27 May. However, with a great interest in independent human rights work, Mendes came early so as to have a chance to meet and familiarise himself with organisations such as the Human Rights House Foundation and Network, the Norwegian Council for Africa and many others. Niels Jacob Harbitz, HRH’s Project Manager for Africa, was Mendes’s host outside of the seminar he attended, and guided him through a hectic programme of meetings and media interviews.
-The tip of the iceberg
At the lunch meeting at the human rights house, Mendes emphasised the need for a completely different system of justice to be introduced in Angola. In one region, he exemplified, there are more than 2 million people, but only two practising lawyers. Maos Livres (‘Free Hands’) has approximately 80 employees spread at eight different regional offices. And even if these 80 employees deal with tens of thousands of cases every year, and refer only approximately 200 to the court system, in other words, reaching out of court-settlements in close to a hundred percent of their cases, thus saving that very same system from an even much bigger back-log of cases, one is still only talking about the tip of the iceberg.
-A Human Rights House is exactly what we need
Mendes, aged only 43, already holds a very impressive CV. In 1992, at the age of 30, he took over as Minister for the Environment in the Government of Angola, a position he held for the next five years. After that, he served as a private lawyer for two years before becoming the Executive President of Maos Livres in 1999, an organisation he has helped to grow enormously, both in size and influence, since. Educated a lawyer from the Agostinho Neto University of Angola and with a Diploma on Protection of Human Rights from the Institute of Human Rights of Åbo Akademi University, Finland, Mendes knows well what justice ought to be. As a practitioner of law in his own country, he also knows what the short-comings to justice there are. Finally, he also has clear ideas on how to amend those. And one of his ideas, is exactly to establish at least one Human Rights House, in which many organisations can co-operate, for the best of all their individual clients.
