Andrésia Vaz was born on February 4, 1944, in Senegal. She graduated from the National Centre for Law Studies (Centre National d'Etudes juridiques) in France in 1969. Andresia began her career as an Examining Judge of the Tribunal de Première Instance de Dakar. She was subsequently appointed President of the Labour Tribunal in Saint Louis, Senegal, and later Chief of the Examining Judges in Dakar as well as Vice President of the Tribunal de Première Instance de Dakar. Andrezia was also a junior lecturer at the Senegalese National School of Administration and Magistracy until 1991. Judge Vaz was further promoted to the Court of Appeal and became the President of the Court in 1992. A year later she was appointed President of the National Electoral Commission of Senegal and in 1997 she became the first President of the Supreme Court of Senegal.

In 2001 Judge Vaz was elected by the United Nations General Assembly as a judge of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in Arusha, Tanzania. She was re-elected in February 2003 and became Vice President of the Tribunal. Vaz was a member of the Appeals Chamber which is common to both the ICTR and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) at The Hague, Netherlands. She ended her tenure with the Tribunal in May 2013.

Throughout her career, Judge Vaz has participated in several conferences, including the Conference of Chief Judges of the Commonwealth and Judges of Appeal Courts, and the International Federation of Women Lawyers’ “World Peace Through the Law” conference. She is a member of the International Union of Magistrates, the International Commission of Jurists (Associate Member), and a member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, Netherlands.