Nida Usman Chaudhary

Nida holds LL.B (Hons) and LL.M in Law and Development from the University of London. She is a diversity and inclusion advocate and the founder of Lahore Education and Research Network as well as the Women in Law Initiative Pakistan. Her focus has been on bridging the gap between legal education and practice through capacity building and to work for equality of access and advancement of female lawyers in the profession. She combines her professional interests in law and human rights with her activism on environmental and development issues. She was the Founding Member and Chairperson of the Gender Equality and Diversity Committee of the Lahore High Court Bar Association from 2018-20. Currently, she is leading women in law's collaborative project with the Ministry of Law and Justice and Group Development Pakistan on increasing women's representation in Law supported by Australian high Commission and the British High Commission.

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.

Nida has considerable research and policy experience in International Investment Laws. Her paper, ‘Democratizing Investment Laws: Ensuring Minimum Standards for Host States’, was published internationally in the Journal of World Investment and Trade in 2013 where after she regularly wrote on international investment law and investor-state arbitrations. She was also engaged to give her legal opinion on Bilateral Investment Treaties 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 has also organised several capacity building sessions on Arbitration as part of her role at School of Law, including an arbitral award workshop with Arran Dowling Hussey as guest speaker. She also co-organised a day-long conference on 'The Arbitration Express: A One-Stop Vocational Training Course' with Barrister Hassan Nawaz Sheikh in 2017. Later she served as the Country Ambassador to Pakistan of Alliance for Equality in Dispute Resolution for the year 2018.

In recent years, she has been working on promotion of ethical and responsible digital engagement and communication. In an increasingly polarised online world, Nida believes that room for a 'third perspective' is rapidly diminishing from online discourse and the space is shrinking for any restorative and reformative policy and development in contentious matters.

She has considerable counselling and academic experience and has been teaching law since 2005. Her work has been published internationally as well as in national newspapers and academic blogs including, The News, Dawn, The Nation, Naya Daur and other digital platforms including Ananke, a UAE based digital magazine.

She combines her professional interests in law and human rights with her activism on environmental and development issues. Nida is interested in promoting and cultivating understanding between people of the world for a more tolerant and peaceful society. She believes education needs to play a more potent role in developing young minds so that the progressive, green and peaceful world that we aspire can become a reality for all. It is towards that end that she is now working.