Inkeri Anttila

Sylvi Inkeri Anttila (1916-2013) was a Finnish legal scholar and criminologist who broke gender barriers throughout her career, becoming the first woman in Finland to earn a doctorate in law, in 1946, and the country's first female professor of criminal law, in 1961. She later led Finland's Institute of Criminology and served as Finland's first female Minister of Justice in a caretaker government in 1975, where she advanced reforms in sentencing, drunk driving law and parole. Anttila authored roughly 79 publications advocating humanitarian approaches to criminal justice for offenders and victims alike, and became the first director of the United Nations' European Institute for Crime Prevention and Control in the early 1980s.