First Individual: A life devoted to indigenous rights in Brazil

Joenia Wapixana With a regulation diploma from the Federal College of Roraima, Ms. Wapixana has been advocating on behalf of indigenous communities within the Brazilian Amazon for the reason that Nineteen Nineties.

In 2018, on the finish of a protracted marketing campaign, financed on the grassroots stage by crowdfunding, she turned the primary indigenous girl elected to Brazil’s federal parliament.

In that very same 12 months, she was awarded the UN Human Rights Prize, a excessive profile award whose earlier winners have included Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela.

After taking the “Raposa Serra do Sol” land dispute to the Inter-American Fee on Human Rights, Wapixana turned the primary indigenous lawyer to argue and win a case earlier than the Supreme Court docket of Brazil.