Tanya Murshed is amongst the eleven nominees for this year’s Bar Pro Bono Award, in recognition of her work with death row inmates in Uganda.
Tanya is the founder of Evolve, a barrister led organisation which aims to improve access to justice, build capacity within the legal profession and promote efficiency, integrity and fairness within the criminal justice system of Uganda through the provision of pro bono assistance. A team of volunteer barristers – including a number of Tanya’s colleagues at 1MCB – have assisted approximately 500 prisoners pro bono in appeals against conviction and sentence and in mitigation hearings following the abolition of the mandatory death penalty in Uganda in 2009.
Supporting Tanya’s nomination, Declan O’Callaghan, a barrister at Landmark Chambers who has acted as amicus curiae in several capital cases before the Ugandan appeal courts, said,“In essence, and this is no blustery overstatement said with flippancy – a considerable number of people owe their lives to Tanya’s capacity for hard work and her ability to persuade a number of professionals to give up their time and commitment to helping death row prisoners in Uganda. Her work is the true essence of ‘pro bono’.”
