FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Leading Women’s-Rights Scholar Rangita de Silva de Alwis Named to U.N. General Assembly President’s Advisory Council on Gender Equality
Appointment of University of Pennsylvania Carey Law professor underscores accelerating global momentum to embed legal accountability for women’s rights ahead of Beijing+30 milestone
Philadelphia, PA – January 23, 2025
The University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School today announced that Distinguished Adjunct Professor Rangita de Silva de Alwis has been appointed to the President of the U.N. General Assembly’s high-level Advisory Council on Gender Equality. The panel will counsel the 79th session president on integrating women’s rights into negotiations on the Pact for the Future and other multilateral reforms slated for adoption later this year.
De Silva de Alwis, who also serves as Vice-Chair of the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute, joins a select group of international lawyers, economists, and civil-society leaders charged with translating the U.N.’s 30-year-old Beijing Platform for Action into enforceable contemporary standards. The Council’s first briefing is expected to inform the General Assembly’s thematic debate on financing for gender equality scheduled for March 2025.
“The world is at a legal inflection point,” de Silva de Alwis said. “From algorithmic bias to climate-driven displacement, emerging threats disproportionately impact women. Embedding binding gender provisions into the Pact for the Future will determine whether multilateralism can deliver equal protection in practice, not just principle.”
Women’s rights experts say the appointment arrives as governments confront stubborn implementation gaps. Only 26 percent of the 193 U.N. member states have met the 50–50 gender parity target for elected office set out in Sustainable Development Goal 5, according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union’s 2024 audit. Meanwhile, U.N. Women calculates that at the current pace of reform, equal representation in senior public administration will not be achieved until 2076—51 years behind schedule.
Market data reinforce the economic stakes. A January 2025 International Labour Organization report attributes USD 6.3 trillion in annual global GDP losses to legal barriers that restrict women’s labor-force participation. Conversely, economies that closed more than 80 percent of their legal gender gaps over the past decade posted per-capita growth rates 1.6 percentage points above the global average, the World Bank’s 2024 Women, Business and the Law study found.
De Silva de Alwis has shaped many of the normative tools now being deployed to reverse those losses. As a member of the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), she co-drafted General Recommendation 40, which redefines “equal representation” from numerical quotas to parity in decision-making power and mandates intersectional analysis across race, disability, and migration status. The recommendation is already cited in pending constitutional reforms in Chile, Kenya, and Spain.
Her forthcoming monograph, Global Gender Justice: A Casebook on Women’s Human Rights (Cambridge University Press), will debut at the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women in March and serve as a curriculum backbone for judicial-training institutes in 16 Commonwealth countries.
“Rangita’s scholarship moves seamlessly from ivory-tower theory to treaty-body language that judges can cite tomorrow,” said Penn Carey Law Dean Theodore Ruger. “Having one of our faculty inside the General Assembly president’s inner circle ensures that evidence-based research—not rhetoric—drives the next generation of gender-equality commitments.”
The Advisory Council will convene next at U.N. Headquarters on February 11 to finalize policy briefs on gender-responsive AI governance and on codifying “gender apartheid” as a crime against humanity. De Silva de Alwis co-authored the latter concept while advising the U.K. Parliamentary Inquiry on Gender Apartheid last year; diplomats say the proposal now has growing traction among Nordic and Latin-American states.
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