Ramona Vijeyarasa

Ramona Vijeyarasa (Bonavero Institute of Human Rights)

Ramona Vijeyarasa is an Associate Professor and Director of the Juris Doctor Program in the Faculty of Law at the University of Technology Sydney, where she has worked since 2017 Ramona is the Chief Investigator behind the Gender Legislative Index (GLI), an online tool that uses human evaluators and machine learning to assess whether domestic laws meet global women's rights standards. Its evaluation of the gender-responsiveness over 130 domestic laws across four jurisdictions instigated the creation of a Gender and Equality Audit Committee in the State of Tasmania in Australia. Her work innovatively combines law, engineering and data science to reinvigorate decades-long debates about the law’s role in addressing gender inequality.

Ramona is author of The Woman President: A study of law, leadership and legacy on women’s lives based on experiences from South and Southeast Asia (OUP 2022), editor of International Women’s Rights Law and Gender Equality: Making the law work for women (Routledge, 2021) and author of Sex, Slavery and the Trafficked Women: Myths and Misconceptions about Trafficking and its Victims (Routledge 2015). Her current book project, Rewriting the Rules: Gender-Responsive Law-Making for the Twenty-First Century will be published by University of California Press in 2026.

Ramona’s scholarship has been recognised by the American Society of International Law (2022), the Australian and New Zealand Society of International Law (2021) and the Letten Foundation and Young Academy of Norway (2021). In 2022, she was named the Australia & NZ Woman in AI in the Law Category and 2nd Runner-Up for the Woman in AI Innovator of the Year. Her research has been funded by the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs, the Australian Academy of the Social Sciences and she has been a Women’s Leadership Institute Australia Research Fellow since 2020.

Ramona brings to academia a decade of experience working in civil society as a women’s rights lawyer and activist. Her international human rights activism has included advancing anti-trafficking victim reintegration networks in Vietnam and Ukraine; filing briefs before the European Court of Human Rights, the Supreme Court of Moldova, and the Supreme Court of the Philippines; and managing multi-country programs to advance women’s reproductive rights and freedom from violence across the global South.