Shanthi Dairiam served as ARROW’s Programme Advisory Committee member from 1993 -1999.

She is a Malaysian human rights and women's rights advocate and United Nations (UN) official. 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. She is the founder and a previous director of International Women's Rights Action Watch - Asia Pacific, regional, independent, non-profit NGO that collaborates with national women’s groups, governments, inter-governmental bodies and academic institutions, to monitor and facilitate the implementation of the UN CEDAW Convention. The programme works in fourteen countries of Asia and coordinates international advocacy through networking with women throughout the world.

She has organized programmes on women’s rights that establish the relationship between mainstream human rights discourse and women’s rights, the use of the law as a tool for women’s development at the Asian national and regional level as well as at the international level and promoting the CEDAW Convention as a framework for women’s development and rights at the national, regional and international level She has f acilitated the development of scholarship, skills and strategies on the application of the principles of the CEDAW Convention to promote women’s rights, developed methodologies for preparing reports to the CEDAW Committee.

She has facilitated the development of a national policy on women in Malaysia; operationalisation of the National Policy for Women in Malaysia and six months of work at the Commonwealth Secretariat, London, geared towards mainstreaming women’s interests and needs into national development and has also presented papers and facilitated training on the application of the rights based approach to promote women’s health and reproductive choice.

Recently, she 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 an aid blockade of Gaza.

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