Farida Shaheed, a sociologist by training and activist by choice, is the Executive Director of Shirkat Gah – Women’s Resource Centre, Pakistan’s first feminist organization. Ms. Shaheed is a founding member of the Women’s Action Forum (WAF) which led the resistance to the Pakistani martial law regime in the 1980s. Recipient of several national and international human rights awards, she was the UN’s first Independent Expert and Special Rapporteur for cultural rights from 2009 to 2015. Her UN reports include three on intellectual property laws from a human rights perspective and one on gender-equal cultural rights.

Kumudini Therese Samuel is a feminist activist and researcher from Sri Lanka. She heads DAWN’s Political Restructuring and Social Transformation analysis team. Kumi is a co-founder of the Women and Media Collective (Colombo, 1984). She participated on the campaign to realize CEDAW General Recommendation 30 on women in Conflict Prevention and has engaged in the review process to CEDAW, ICCPR, ICESCR, and the Universal Periodic Review. She is a member of several high-level working groups, including the UN Women’s Civil Society Advisory Group for Bhutan, the Maldives, India, and Sri Lanka. Kumi has published extensively on these themes, and her most recent book is Political Economy of Conflict and Violence Against Women (DAWN, 2020). Her current research focus is on post-conflict transitions and constitution-making.