Irena Brežná, born in 1950 in Bratislava. In 1968, she emigrated to Switzerland with her parents. Since graduating from the Faculty of Arts at Basel University (lic. phil. in Slavonic studies, philosophy and psychology) in 1975, she has worked as a teacher of Russian, a translator and interpreter of Slavonic languages and for 10 years as a psychologist at psychology research institutes in Munich and Basel. More recently, she has begun to work increasingly as an independent journalist and author.

She continues to be actively involved in a variety of areas on a voluntary basis. For 12 years during the 1970s and 1980s she campaigned for the release of Soviet political prisoners in her role as a coordinator for the Swiss chapter of Amnesty international. She has helped those who opposed the regimes in Central and Eastern Europe (inter alia the Moscow Centre for Prison Reform) and she assisted in establishing the first Slovak feminist magazine Aspekt in Bratislava. Her other work includes fundraising for Chechen women’s projects, and collecting works of world literature for a library in Mamou, Guinea in West Africa, as well as text books for local schools.

During The First Chechen war (1994-96) and during a short period of independence there (1996-98), she visited the destroyed country several times and since then has reported in more than 80 texts on the atrocities committed in the conflict and about the freedom fight of Chechen female human rights activists.