Nepal Gets Its First Female Muslim Lawyer, Hope Surrounds Women’s Career

Mohna Ansari, Nepal’s first female lawyer and a Muslim bring a ray of hope for the Nepalese women who are now ‘slowly coming up’. Ansari is the country’s first female Muslim lawyer and a Commissioner at the Nepal Human Rights Commission (NHRC), said reports. Also, she is the first to become a graduate in her family.  

“The new constitutional amendments give them a ray of hope,” says Ansari who belongs to a lower middle class family in Nepalgunj, a small town in the southern fringe of the Himalayan country. Mohna Ansari joined the NHRC as a Commissioner on November 2014, after she received a call from the Nepal government that asked her to join the five-member commission that tackles issues like security force excesses and gender discrimination in Nepal.

Reports are that before Ansari started working at NHRC, she had her first government assignment at the National Women Commission (NWC) for four years where she was a Commissioner too. She worked at NWC from 2010 on a United Nations Development Programme project. “This was the first time a Muslim (woman) was appointed at such a high level,” asserted Ansari who is quite active in social media.

Reports are that Mohna’s rise as a Muslim woman in a post in the government body is a result of ‘the change that has been taking place in Nepal since the monarchy was abolished in 2006 - after a decade of Maoist rebellion,’ sources said. Mohna is also the first woman, from a NGO background who understands the issues and addresses problems faced by ordinary people of Nepal. Her social media accounts are flooded with such complaints and shares that address women’s and indigenous rights, issues of the Madhesis and delays in post-earthquake reconstruction.

“I was the first to oppose the deployment of the army to deal with Madhesi agitation. I was the first to speak publicly against that,” she said while referring to recent protests by the Madhesis who occupies more than a third of the Nepal’s population but are economically and politically underrepresented.

The blazing career today saw a lot of problems during her early days. The 39-year-old, soft-speaking lady said that her family was completely dependent upon her father’s carpentry shops but she went to school and completed her study. With a graduation degree in law, Ansari said she faced a lot of problem again when she wanted to work as a full-time lawyer because she was a Muslim lady. “It was too difficult to begin my career in Kathmandu with my background. My family supported me all along,” Mohna said while sharing her work experience.