Mandela award for murdered lawyer

Mozambican lawyer Elvino Dias, who was murdered in Mozambique in 2024 while representing the country’s Presidential candidate Venâncio Mondlane, is this year’s posthumous winner of Portuguese NGO ProPública’s Nelson Mandela Award. According to the Club of Mozambique, this was confirmed by the association’s president Agostinho Pereira de Miranda. With the choice of this year’s award winner, the association wanted to ‘honour the example of a lawyer who lost his life while carrying out his duties”’, but also to “express (…) solidarity with Mozambican lawyers and, in general, with African lawyers who carry out extraordinarily important duties in the defence of human rights’, doing this work ‘in very, very difficult circumstances’, he added. Arguing that ‘a lawyer can never be confused with the interests of his client’, because ‘lawyers represent people and not causes, which belong to their clients’, the president of PorPública – Direito e Cidadania emphasised that it would not be ‘even legitimate’ to say that the murder of Elvino Dias was motivated by political convictions.

De Miranda said Dias ‘was murdered because he represented someone uncomfortable with power’ and he was murdered in a way that the Mozambican Judges Association considered ‘heinous’. A few days before the murder, Dias had publicly announced that he was collecting evidence of the electoral fraud claimed by his constituent, reports the Club of Mozambique. The Mozambican lawyer and Podemos leader, Paulo Guambe, were shot dead in the same ambush in the centre of Maputo, in October last year, a crime that the Mozambican Attorney-General’s office said was still being investigated, but has yet to produce any results. De  Miranda recalled that the international community, specifically the International Bar Association (IBA), which represents more than a m i l l i o n lawyers around the world, had asked for an international investigation into the case in the middle of the election period. Mozambique’s Bar Association labelled it a ‘barbaric murder’, ProPública said. The prize, worth €10 000, will be awarded on 18 July, Nelson Mandela International Day, which celebrates the birth date of the man who put an end to the apartheid regime in South Africa.

Full report on the Club of Mozambique site