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Awet Tesfaiesus was born in Asmara in what was then Ethiopia / now Eritrea and fled to Germany with her family as a child due to the Eritrean War of Independence. After graduating from high school, she studied law in Heidelberg, was admitted to the bar in 2006, and in the same year she founded her law firm for asylum issues in Kassel, which she ran until the end of 2021. In 2009, she joined the party Bündnis 90/Die Grünen and in the following years worked at the local political level in the Kassel City Hall in the areas of equality and anti-discrimination. In 2021, she was elected as the first black woman to the German Bundestag. Here she represents the Green parliamentary group in the Legal Affairs Committee and as chairwoman in the Committee on Culture and Media.