Shaista Shameem

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Shaista Shameem is a Fijian lawyer, journalist, and academic of Indian descent. She is best known as Director of the Fiji Human Rights Commission, and is known throughout the South Pacific region for her fervent human rights activism. On August 2004, she was appointed UN Special Rapporteur on the use of mercenaries.

Shameem holds a Doctorate in Philosophy from New Zealand's University of Waikato and an LLM from the University of Auckland. She has worked as a journalist and has practiced law in Fiji, and has lectured in sociology at the University of Waikato.

[edit] 2006 coup d'état

Main article: 2006 Fijian coup d'état

Shameem refused to condemn the military coup which deposed the Qarase government on 5 December 2006. Early in January 2007, she sparked a storm of controversy in early 2007 when she released a Commission report stating that the government overthrown by the Republic of Fiji Military Forces was illegally constituted and unconstitutional, and was acting against the public interest in violation of public security and public safety protections in the constitution. She also said that the 2001 elections were unlawful, and that proper procedures had not been not followed in the 2006 general elections. She has been called by the Australian Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, an apologist for the Fiji Military Forces. In reply, she has publicly told reporters that the Australian Foreign Minister should "get a life". New Zealand Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters has said that a Fiji Human Rights Booklet which New Zealand financially appears to have been perverted by a change in its language, ie, implies support for the military of Fiji.

[edit] Personal life

Shameem is her mother's surname as opposed to her father's. Shameem's father was from Pakistan while her mother a Fiji Indian. Shameem is the sister of Fiji's first and only female Indo-Fijian judge, Nazhat Shameem and Rafat Shameem who is a doctor in Palmerston North, New Zealand. Nikhat Shameem [1] is the third sibling who is a lecturer in applied linguistics at New Castle University in Australia.