Maryluz Barragán
Deputy Director, Centre for Law, Justice and Society - Dejusticia
Maryluz Barragán González is a Colombian lawyer specialising in constitutional law, a human rights advocate, and an expert in strategic litigation.
She is currently the deputy director of the Center for Law, Justice, and Society (Dejusticia) and co-founder of Ilex Acción Jurídica. She holds a master's degree in law with a specialisation in critical race studies from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and is a doctoral candidate in advanced human rights studies at the Carlos III University of Madrid.
She is a Black woman, born and raised in Cartagena, a city on the Caribbean coast of Colombia with a predominantly Black population. She comes from a working-class family and is the youngest of six siblings. From a very young age, she has experienced, challenged, and overcome the dynamics of everyday and institutional racism that persist in Colombian society.
Throughout her professional career, she has held positions and provided legal advice to important Colombian state institutions, including the Constitutional Court, the Council of State, the Comptroller General of the Republic, and the State Legal Defense Agency, as well as working for the USAID Programme for Afro-descendants and Indigenous Peoples.