Nida Usman Chaudhary

Founder

Nida Usman Chaudhary holds LL.B (Hons) and LL.M in Law & Development from University of London. She is the Founder of Lahore Education And Research Network (LEARN) and Women in Law Initiative Pakistan. She curated and led the project ‘increasing women’s representation in law’ by Ministry of Law and Justice, Group Development Pakistan and Women in Law Initiative Pakistan supported by Australian High Commission and the British High Commission. She was the founding Chairperson of the Gender Equality and Diversity Committee of the Lahore High Court Bar Association from 2018-20. She has been at the forefront of bringing the notion of Continuing Professional Development (CPD) in law to Pakistan through her engagement as the Vice Principal and Director of International Programmes at School of Law, Lahore in 2013. She won the prestigious Justitia Award, Vienna for academia international in 2021 and for her women’s rights activism as a global top 50 woman, in Sri Lanka in 2023. She was also honoured by the Governor of Punjab on the 75th Independence Day of Pakistan through a certificate of Recognition. Nida was also featured in Femilist 100 from from global south by Gender Security Project in 2021 and received the ’emerging women leader’ award in 2018 by SEPLAA SewEGap, Pakistan.

She has considerable counselling and academic experience and has been teaching law since 2005. She occasionally contributes articles on legal issues to newspapers and academic blogs and is an internationally published author of several papers on investment law. She was also engaged to give her legal opinion on BITS and conduct capacity building sessions on international investment laws for the Punjab Board of Investment and Trade (PBIT) when she was working at RSIL, Pakistan.

She combines her professional interests in law and human rights with her activism on environmental and development issues. During her time in Law School, she served as the head of the Human Rights Society at University College Lahore (UCL) and organized talks on the law of negligence in light of the Margalla Towers collapse in the devastating earthquake of 2005. She also arranged sessions on the abolition of the death penalty during her time as head of the society at UCL. Whilst still a student, she was actively involved with the Lahore Bachao Tehreek (Save Lahore Movement) to stop the widening of the canal bank road and to preserve its flora and fauna.

She comes from a background of creative arts through which she learned the importance of using art as a tool to communicate revolutionary ideas.  Her love for creative arts has led her to venture into writing fiction and her debut short story features in the highly anticipated anthology on stories from the pandemic by Liberty Books Pakistan. Nida wishes to uplift the writing industry in Pakistan and believes that our stories much reach global audiences. In order to promote the work of local authors, she became one of the founding members of ‘Authors’ Alliance Pk’ along with Awais Khan, Laaleen Sukhera, Mehr F. Hussain and Sara Naveed.