Mary Shanthi Dairiam


Mary Shanthi Dairiam is a Malaysian human rights and women's rights advocate and United Nations official.

Education

Shanthi received a master's in English literature from the University of Madras in India in 1962. She received a master's in Gender and Development from the University of Sussex in the UK in 1991.

Career

Although trained as an English teacher, Shanthi became interested in women's rights after volunteering with the Federation of Family Planning Associations in the late 1970s and seeing the inequalities women faced.
In the mid-1980s, she was involved in the lobbying for the enactment of the Domestic Violence Act. She has since 2004 served on the UN's Gender Equality Task Force, and on the Committee on Elimination of Discrimination against Women. From 2004 to 2008, she was also a member of the UN's CEDAW committee, within which she was appointed Rapporteur in January 2007.
In 2010, Dairiam was appointed as one of three UN experts to lead an inquiry into the Israeli navy's response to the Marmara flotilla that sought to break a blockade of Gaza.
Dairiam is the founder and a current director of International Women's Rights Action Watch - Asia Pacific, a charity devoted to the implementation of the CEDAW convention.
After a year, she set up IWRAW-Asia Pacific and is now regarded as an expert on Cedaw and provides technical services to several governments in the Asia Pacific region to build capacity for the implementation of Cedaw. Shanti's book, A Woman's Right To Equality: The Promise Of Cedaw, was launched at the Beijing +20 conference in Bangkok, Thailand recently.