Paz Rojas Baeza

Paz Rojas Baeza was born in Santiago de Chile in 1932 and is a neuropsychiatrist. From the beginning of the dictatorship in Chile in 1973, she worked with the Comité Pro Paz, which cared for victims of torture, relatives of the disappeared, or those executed. Until 1974, she was a professor and head of the clinic in the Neurological Department of the José Joaquín Aguirre Hospital (Universidad de Chile). She continued her work in exile in France.

She returned in 1981 and joined the Corporación de Promoción y Defensa de los Derechos del Pueblo (CODEPU) and fought against impunity. In 2001, she helped found the Ethics Commission against Torture, whose work was crucial for the establishment of the Valech Commission in 2003, which recognized the use of torture by state officials. P. Rojas was awarded the Human Rights Prize by the University of Oslo (Norway) in 1998 and the Human Rights Prize by the Chilean Medical Association in 2019.