Swati Mehta is a Senior Fellow at New York University’s Center on International Cooperation (CIC) on the Pathfinders for Peaceful, Just and Inclusive Societies team.
A passionate believer in law and justice as tools for empowering people, building trust, and promoting social change, she has worked on the rule of law and access to justice for over 20 years.
Starting her career by providing legal aid for women, she soon moved on to systemic reform. More recently, her work has focused on legal empowerment, decentralization, and democratization of justice, with people at the center of justice programming.
Working with several Civil Society Organizations (CSOs), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and other justice programs in South and Southeast Asia, she has provided technical advice and strengthened the capacities of police organizations, prison officials, lawyers, legal aid institutions, judiciary, law schools, and CSOs in taking a people-centered and learning approach to justice. She has written, edited, and reviewed several papers on legal empowerment, policing, legal aid, and traditional, customary, and informal justice systems.
She is a Chevening Scholar and holds an LLM degree in International Criminal Law, Criminology, and Criminal Justice from King’s College London. She loves to engage with young people, artists, and musicians on justice and excels at building strong and productive cross-cultural teams.