Interview with Andra Matei, winner of the EMA Alumni Award 2024
The Press Office had the occasion to interview the winner of the EMA Alumni Award 2024 Andra Matei about her work at AvantGarde Lawyers and the experience of earning this recognition.
Could you tell us more about yourself, your EMA experience and your role now at Avant-Garde Lawyers?
I am a Paris based free-speech lawyer, with distinction of Advocate Emeritus from the Québec Bar. I graduated with a Master’s degree in Human Rights and Democratisation from the European Master’s Programme at the Global Campus of Human Rights in 2007. My time at the Global Campus was transformative. It sharpened my understanding of human rights, and deepened my commitment to standing up against injustice worldwide. It is at the Global Campus that I forged some of the most important relationships of my life, and I am truly grateful to count faculty and fellow alumni amongst close collaborators and friends today.
Currently, I am the Founding Director at Avant-Garde Lawyers. At AGL, I am working to ensure that artists can imagine and create freely. To fulfill our mission, we leverage the full potential of the law in order to expand the space for artistic freedom both inside and outside the courts. In the past six years, we have supported artists being censored, harassed, persecuted, and imprisoned from across the world. I am proud to share that Avant-Garde Lawyers is the only organisation in the world providing specialised legal support to artists.
What means for you to be the recipient of the EMAlumni Award 2024?
The EMA network comprises thousands of professionals working in the field of human rights. The solidarity and support of this community has played an important role in ensuring that I am able to implement my ideas and build a ground-breaking movement from scratch. Recognition from my peers in the form of the EMAlumni Award means a lot to me. It assures me that I am not alone in this work, and that the values that I stand for are shared, understood and appreciated by this network of brilliant individuals.
What will the most important challenges be in relation to promoting human rights and democracy in the years to come? How might EMA graduates continue to help?
Across the world, we are witnessing the backsliding of democratic values and human rights. This is exacerbated by geopolitical conflicts and rising authoritarianism. But for me - the most crucial challenge in relation to promoting human rights and democracy is the stifling of dissenting voices. Freedom of expression is crucial to be able to raise concerns about human rights violations and to hold governments accountable. In the absence of this crucial right, public debate and movements for the realisation of all other rights become impossible.
EMA graduates can play an instrumental role in promoting the right to freedom of expression as a fundamental right. Through different instruments, be it law, public policy, art, literature or academia, they can keep defending this value and ensuring that it does not get drowned out amongst the noise of so many other, seemingly more urgent issues.
Could you give a message to our Global Campus community?
There is a tendency amongst human rights defenders, including myself to automatically assume who the good guys and the bad guys are, and this is a very dangerous tendency in an increasingly binary world. If we think we perfectly understand the complicity of geopolitical conflict, then we all need to think better, we need to see better – there are many thruths and we are probably looking at one of them. If I were to send one message to the community then it would be this: look for feelings of uncertainty, contradictoriality and confusion. When we are confused, it is the first sign that we are beginning to grasp the complexity of a situation - we don’t function from default setting, we don’t carry our prejudices with us, we are more open to the other. And this precisely the space where real conversation can take place. Don’t be yourself, be the other!
For more information contact our Press and Communications PR Offices:
Elisa Aquino – Isotta Esposito – Francesca Sante
pressoffice@gchumanrights.org - communications@gchumanrights.org
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