Rangita de Silva de Alwis, a senior adjunct professor of global leadership in the Penn Carey Law School, will serve as the special advisor to the U.K. Parliamentary Committee on Gender Apartheid, chaired by Baroness Helena Kennedy of the Shaws KC.

The inquiry will include oral hearings, written testimony and desk research. A report on its findings and recommendations will engage domestic and international bodies with the findings throughout the inquiry and upon completion of the inquiry.

As a member of the UN Committee on the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, Ms. de Silva de Alwis will also help draft language on gender apartheid on General Recommendation 40 of the treaty. This will be the first time that the crime of gender apartheid will be invoked in international norm creation.

Her recent paper, “Holding the Taliban Accountable for Gender Persecution,” will be published by Cambridge Press. In the paper, Ms. de Silva de Alwis examines the legal standards of gender persecution, “the evolving descriptor of gender apartheid as a way to describe the status of women in Afghanistan,” and legal accountability procedures designed to both hold perpetrators of crimes against humanity accountable and to vindicate Afghan women’s rights.

“Although the current locus of the paper is focused on Afghan women,” writes Ms. de Silva de Alwis, “it has larger implications for all other crimes of gender persecution.”