The Alumni Network would like to congratulate Pacharo Kayira (an International Human Rights Law alumnus, class of 2007) on his new position as Malawi’s Deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland.
Pacharo Kayira joined the Ministry of Justice in Malawi in 2001 immediately after obtaining his Honours Law Degree from the University of Malawi. His early professional years were about court work, mainly prosecuting various criminal cases in the courts of Malawi. A huge turning point came in 2005 when he was accepted by Lund University to study a Master’s in International Human Rights Law, which he himself describes as a real water shed moment for his career. At the end of his studies in 2007, one of his ambitions was to ensure that human rights were more entrenched in the work of the Ministry of Justice. By 2010, a human rights desk in the Ministry was set up, which grew to a Human Rights Unit by 2013.
The primary task was to coordinate Malawi’s reporting obligations with the United Nations and the African Union, and so his career therefore took a swing into human rights full time.
In 2016, the Unit became a fully-fledged section within the Ministry. As head of this section, he spent a lot of time coordinating the Malawi government’s response on human rights issues, which in turn lead him to many meetings in Gambia at the African Commission on Human and People’s Rights and in Geneva at the United Nations, where he started his position on 5 September 2021.
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