Ngô Đình Lệ Quyên

Ngô Đình Lệ Quyên (26 July 1959 – 16 April 2012), was a South Vietnamese-born Italian lawyer who served as Commissioner of Immigration for the city of Rome.

At the age of four, on November 2, 1963, after the South Vietnamese coup d'état, in which both her Father Ngô Đình Nhu and Uncle Ngo Dinh Diem were assassinated, she was forced to leave her country and eventually arrived in Rome, Italy, accompanied by her two brothers. At that time her mother Madame Nhu and sister Ngo Dinh Le Thuy were in the middle of a good-will tour in the United States on behalf of the Vietnamese government.

Once reunited the family lived in Paris for two years and then in 1965, the family moved to Rome where she received a thorough education from Elementary through High School in the private Catholic Institution of the Nevers Sisters.

In 1969, she was among the first foreign exiles to receive the status of political refugee in Italy. She was a political refugee for the next 39 years.

In 1978, she obtained a Humanities prep High School Diploma from Liceo Classico.

She earned a law degree at the Sapienza University of Rome. In her thesis she delved into The problem of Việt-Nam in the Geneva conference of 1954.

She also attended a two-year course in Marian Theology at the Pontifical Theological University Marianum in Rome.

From 1989, guided by the university professor of International Law Maria Rita Saulle, she began doing research work in the field of human rights, asylum and migrations, international and EC law at the Naval University of Naples as well as International Law and Organisation at the University of Rome La Sapienza. She directed several professional training courses and lectured within the master course in "International Protection of Human Rights" of the Faculty of Political Science in Rome (from its establishment in 2001 until 2012).

In 1998, she began her cooperation with the Superior School of Administration of the Interior (SSAI), where she was enlisted in the teachers' register.

In November 1992, she was introduced to don Luigi di Liegro, Director of Caritas Rome, by professor Saulle. She then began her activity in Caritas as Coordinator of the Counselling Centre for Immigrants of the Diocesan Caritas of Rome, the widest and most structured observatory of immigration in the voluntary sector in Italy (more than 185,000 files on foreign nationals registered from 1981 representing 146 countries).

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