University of Pretoria honours Nana Oye Lithur

The Centre for Human Rights based at the Faculty of Law, University of Pretoria, has honoured Nana Oye Lithur for her elevation as Ghana’s Minister of Gender, Children and Social Protection.

The Centre established, in 1986, as part of South Africa’s domestic efforts against the apartheid system of the time, acknowledged the Minister, who is an alumina, for her unrelenting human rights crusade across the continent.

The Centre in a statement to the Ghana News Agency in Accra at the weekend noted that in 2011, Nana Oye Lithur was selected by the Commonwealth Secretary General to be part of the Commonwealth Observer Group for the Guyana national and regional elections.

“Nana Oye Lithur’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,” the statement stated.

In 2001, Nana Oye Lithur graduated from the Centre with LLM in Human Rights and Democratisation in Africa and in 2007, received the prestigious Vera Chirwa Award for her human rights advocacy on the continent.

According to the statement, 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.

The Centre works towards human rights education in Africa, a greater awareness of human rights, the wide dissemination of publications on human rights in Africa, and the improvement of the rights of women, people living with HIV, indigenous peoples, sexual minorities and other disadvantaged or marginalised persons or groups across the continent.

Source: GNA