Government Cape Verde
Description of Work:
Antonio Mascarenhas Monteiro received a licentiate in Law from the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium. He worked as a researcher at the Inter-University Center of Public Law of Belgium and as a Faculty Assistant at the Catholic University of Louvain from 1974 to 1977. He is founder of the Cape Verdean Bar Association.

President Monteiro served as Secretary-General of the People’s National Assembly of Cape Verde from 1977 to 1980, and as President of the Supreme Court of Justice from 1980 to 1990. He also participated in many international Cape Verdean Delegations, including the Organization of African Unity (OAU) Conference to draft the African Charter on Human Rights, the Addis Ababa Conference to review the OAU Charter, the Human Rights Conferences in Nairobi (Kenya), Strasbourg (France), and Bologna (Italy), and the International Law Symposiums held in Coimbra (Portugal) and Utrecht (Netherlands).

In 1991, Monteiro became the first democratically elected President of the Republic of Cape Verde and was reelected in 1996. During his term in office, President Monteiro continued his participation in the international sphere. While in office, he was Chairman of the Third Conference on Regional System of Human Rights Protection in Africa and Europe and participated in the OAU Goodwill mission to Angola following the country’s first free elections in 1992. In 1993, he was Chairman of the Colloquium on Constitutional Transition in Africa, held at the Catholic University of Louvain, and from 1994 to 1997 he served as President of the Inter-State Committee for Struggle Against Drought in Sahel (CILSS). In his role as Deputy President of the OAU Ad-Hoc Committee for Southern Africa, he attended the signing of the Lusaka Protocol on Peace in Angola in 1994. He was elected President of the Community of Portuguese Speaking Countries (CPLP) in 1998.

Since retirement, President Monteiro has been actively involved in conflict resolution and prevention, and promotion of good governance and representative democracy. Most recently, President Monteiro has accepted an appointment as the fifth Lloyd G. Balfour African President-in-Residence at Boston University’s African Presidential Archives and Research Center (APARC). APARC’s Lloyd G. Balfour African President-in-Residence Program enables former democratically elected African heads of state to spend up to two years at BU, sharing insights on contemporary trends in Africa and interacting with political, religious, and the academic communities throughout the United States.