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Sri Lanka Rangita de Silva de Alwis is a widely recognized international women's rights expert and legal scholar.
Rangita de Silva de Alwis is Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Law and Global Leadership at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, where she also served as the Academic Director of the Global Institute for Human Rights.
Rangita de Silva de Alwis leads the Thomson Reuters Project on Inclusion and Transforming Women’s Leadership and has co-authored reports with the company. She discusses the state of women in leadership positions.
Rangita de Silva de Alwis shared insights on how allyship can open new leadership opportunities for women, as highlighted in a SHRM publication discussing inclusion and diversity.
Rangita de Silva de Alwis is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at Harvard Law School’s Center on the Legal Profession, where she co-authored a study on business leadership's impact on SDGs.
Rangita de Silva de Alwis serves as the Hillary Rodham Clinton Fellow on Gender Equity at GIWPS.
Rangita de Silva de Alwis was the inaugural director of the Global Women’s Leadership Initiative and the Women in Public Service Project launched by Secretary Hillary Clinton and the Seven Sisters Colleges at Wellesley College. She has also served as Distinguished Visiting Lecturer and Madeline Albright Faculty at Wellesley College, and a Senior Scholar at Wellesley Centers for Women.
Rangita de Silva de Alwis is a member of the treaty body to the UN Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), was a Global Advisor to the UN Sustainable Development Goal Fund, and has advised UNICEF, UN Women, UNFPA, and UNDP.
Rangita de Silva de Alwis served as an Expert to the Access to Justice and Technology Task Force of the World Bank.
Rangita de Silva de Alwis is a Sri Lankan-American academic, lawyer, and women’s rights authority. She is noted for advocating for equitable representation of women globally. De Silva de Alwis obtained her Bachelor of Law degree from the University of Colombo in 1991. She then pursued further studies at Harvard Law School, earning her LL.M in 1994 and her S.J.D. in 1997. Her career has spanned over 30 years, working in more than 25 countries with various governmental organizations, non-governmental entities, and academic institutions to advance women’s human rights law, policy-making, and institutional reform.
Her distinguished career includes significant roles such as being a member of the treaty body to the UN Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), where she chairs the Working Group on Individual Petitions Mechanism under the Optional Protocol and co-chairs the Women, Peace and Security initiative. In 2025, she authored the Addendum to the CEDAW’s GR 30 on a new international normative framework on peace and security. She was also named the Hillary Rodham Clinton Distinguished Fellow on Gender Equity at the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security. Her expertise extends to academia, serving as Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Law and Global Leadership at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, and as faculty at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and Wharton. She was a Visiting Fellow at the Faculty of Law, Mansfield College, Oxford, and at the Oxford Bonavero Institute of Human Rights in 2024, and a Visiting Policy Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute in 2025, researching AI-driven Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (LAWS).
De Silva de Alwis has contributed extensively through her publications in leading law journals, including those at Harvard, Yale, Penn, and Columbia, and is set to publish her Casebook on Global Gender Justice with Cambridge University Press. She has served as a Special Advisor to the UK Parliamentary Inquiry on Gender Apartheid and was a Non-Resident Senior Fellow of Harvard Law School’s Center on the Legal Profession, where she co-authored a study on the transformative impact of business leadership on accelerating the SDGs. Her work also includes leading the Global Women’s Leadership Project and Women, Law & Leadership Lab under the auspices of UN Women’s Executive Director, Under Secretary-General Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka. She has advised UNICEF, UN Women, UNFPA, and UNDP on state accountability under human rights treaties and has been recognized with the Austrian Justicia award and honored by Harvard Law School as a Woman Inspiring Change in 2015. She was also recognized in 2010 with the Outstanding American by Choice award from the US Citizenship and Immigration Services.
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