Human rights lawyer who wants jail abolished

TENDAYI Achiume, left, was born in Zambia but left at the age of five and was educated at elite institutions in the US.

She attended Yale and Yale Law School before becoming a clerk on South Africa’s constitutional court. She worked for a New York law firm has been an assistant professor at UCLA since 2014. Throughout her career she has had one goal in mind. ‘I went to law school because I wanted to be an international human rights lawyer,’ she told a Yale student guide.

She has a particular interest in ‘structural xenophobic discrimination’, a notion which says that refugees are commonly denied basic services and rights because people see them as foreigners.

The 36-year-old has close links to a Los Angeles prisoners’ pressure group, Dignity and Power Now, which describes itself as ‘an abolitionist movement’ and which recruits staff by asking the question: ‘Is it your dream career to abolish the jail system?’