Hilary Gbedemah

Hilary Amesika Gbedemah is a lawyer and women's rights campaigner who chaired the United Nations committee on discrimination against women (CEDAW) from 2019 to 2021.

She took her law degree at the University of Ghana in 1975 and was called to the bar in 1977, and later earned an LLM from Georgetown University. She was rector of the Law Institute in Ghana.

Her work in Ghana focused on violence against women and on the trokosi system of ritual servitude, on which she wrote Trokosi: Twentieth Century Female Bondage. She was elected to CEDAW in 2013 and served until the end of 2024, working on its general recommendation on women's access to justice and on education, climate change and inquiries under the Optional Protocol, and she chaired the committee from 2019 to February 2021.