Angelica Zamora, Louis B. Sohn Fellow, 2011

Maria Angélica Zamora Prieto is a Colombian human rights lawyer. She received her LL.M. from the Washington College of Law at American University in 2011, where she focused her studies on International Law, rule of law, human rights and gender issues. Ms. Zamora was one of three recipients of the International Legal Studies Program Alumni Fund Scholarship from the Washington College of Law.

Prior to her LL.M., Ms. Zamora was a Researcher in the Reparations Unit at the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) for three years. During her time with ICTJ, she worked on developing and implementing projects involving victims’ organizations, governmental authorities at both the local and national levels. Her studies of the reparations programs for victims of two massacres in the Colombian countryside, which involved extensive field work in remote regions of that country, were included in a publication, Reparations in Colombia: Dilemmas in Contexts of Conflict, Poverty and Exclusion. In July 2010, Ms. Zamora co-edited the book Reparations For the Displaced: Lessons Learned from Comparative Experience for the Reparation of Victims of Forced Displacement in Colombia, which documents reparations and property restitution programs in South Africa, Kosovo, Turkey and Peru.

In the spring of 2009, Ms. Zamora received a scholarship to participate in a degree on transparency, corruption, and accountability at the Center for Human Rights at the University of Chile. She trained with activists and state officials from thirteen Latin American countries to learn strategies and best practices linking the fight against corruption to human rights.

Ms. Zamora has been committed to research and advocacy on human rights in Colombia since her years as a law student. In 2003, Ms. Zamora joined the Project to Recover Historical Memory: Colombia Nunca Más and then the Lawyers’ Collective “José Alvear Restrepo.”

Born in Villavicencio, Colombia, Ms. Zamora obtained her law degree from the National University of Colombia, in Bogotá, where she also received a degree in Administrative Law.