Mireille Roccatti

Mireille Roccatti Velásquez (born in Monterrey, Nuevo León) is a Mexican scholar and jurist who served as the first female president of the country's National Human Rights Commission.

Life Roccatti was born in Mexico to a French immigrant named Alberto Roccatti Rousseau. He was an engineer and one of the first professors at the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Studies (Tec de Monterrey) after it was founded. Her mother was also a professor at the same school. This led to her studying her first bachelor's degree at the institution along with her brothers and sisters. After finishing this degree, she decided to change course and study law, first a bachelors at the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México, followed her masters and doctorate at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

She is fluent in four languages.

Career During her early career, she was a municipal judge, a criminal court judge and superior court magistrate in the State of Mexico, as well as the legal director for PEMEX. She was in the position for less than a year when dozens of inmates mutinied at an overcrowded state prison, which led to the deaths of sixteen inmates in 1993. She launched an investigation into the matter and send a strong report with recommendations to then governor Emilio Chuayffet Chemor, who complied. During her three years at the commission, she sent out 339 critical recommendations, including the prison report, getting compliance on 75% of them.

Her work in human rights has led to positions in various government and non government organizations such as president of the Federación Mexicana de Organismos Público de Protección y Defensa de los Derechos Humanos from 1993 to 1995, member of the Comité Directive of the International Ombudsman Institute and vice president of the Federación Iberoamericana del Ombudsman. Roccatti has also taught classes at the Universidad Autónoma Benito Juárez de Oaxaca, the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México, the Universidad La Salle and has taught classes in legal theory and human rights at the law school of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México at the graduate level.