Maria do Céu da Silva Lopes Federer was born on Atauro Island, in Portuguese Timor, in 1957.
[1] In 2003 she gave evidence to a public hearing about the mistreatment of political prisoners in the early 1980s.
She said that she saw old people, women and children arriving at the island of Atauro where she was working as an aid worker.
Although the situation was generally more relaxed on the island some women were sexually abused and many children died in a cholera epidemic.
[2] In the same year she led the Comissão Nacional de Eleições which organised elections.