María José Veramendi Villa was AIDA senior attorney for the Human Rights and Environment Program. She is a Peruvian lawyer with degrees from the Universidad de Los Andes in Bogota, Colombia and the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. She has a diploma in Women and Human Rights: Theory and Practice from the Universidad de Chile and an LLM (Master of Laws) in International Legal Studies with a specialization in human rights from the American University Washington College of Law. Previously, she was a researcher in the Human Rights Program at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City, and worked as a human rights lawyer for the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) and as a lawyer at the Legal Defense Institute in Peru. She has worked as a teacher and lecturer of various courses and seminars, and has been published in an array of publications on the subject.