Shyamala Alagendra

Dato’ Shyamala Alagendra is a Malaysian lawyer with over 24 years’ experience as a domestic and international criminal lawyer. She is presently the Gender Advisor to the newly established United Nations (UN) Sri Lanka accountability team and, prior to this, was the Gender and Child Rights Advisor to the United Nations Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar.
  
She served as a prosecution trial lawyer in the International Criminal Court (ICC) on the Darfur cases, where her team investigated and indicted former President of Sudan Omar Al Bashir and senior members of his government. The case against Omar Al Bashir remains the only case at the ICC in which an accused has been charged for genocide. She also served as a prosecutor at the Special Court for Sierra Leone where she successfully prosecuted senior military and rebel commanders and former President of Liberia Charles Taylor for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Shyamala also served as a prosecution trial lawyer at the Special Panel for Serious Crimes in East Timor, leading investigations into and prosecutions of senior Timorese militia leaders and high ranking Indonesian military and police commanders for crimes against humanity related to the 1999 post-referendum violence. 

She has represented persons accused before several international courts, including at the ICC, where she represented the Deputy President of Kenya, William Ruto, and Ambassador Francis Muthauram, the Head of the Civil Service of Kenya. She was counsel and subsequently lead counsel for Saif Al Islam Gadaffi of Libya.  

She acted as legal adviser and counsel at the EULEX Court in Kosovo to the defense team that successfully represented Fatmir Limaj, then Deputy Prime Minister of Kosovo, on war crimes and corruption charges. Shyamala also appeared as counsel before the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, and has represented groups of victims of grave human rights violations in Sierra Leone, Kenya, and Albania. 

Shyamala served as  the Assistant Director of Public Prosecutions of Fiji  between 2018 and 2019. During her tenure, she led the office’s work on sexual violence prosecutions, with particular focus on child rape cases. She successfully argued before the  Supreme Court of Fiji to increase the sentence tariff for child rape, and secured the first life imprisonment sentence ever to be imposed for child rape in the country.