Marcela Ríos Tobar

Served as Minister of Justice and Human Rights in Chile during the government of Gabriel Boric (2022). She holds a PhD in Political scientist from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA, an MA in Social Sciences from the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences in Mexico City (FLACSO – Mexico), and a Bachelor of Arts from York University in Toronto, Canada. She is a recognized scholar, practitioner and activist in the promotion of women´s rights and democracy.

Dr. Ríos Tobar served for over 15 years at the United Nations Development Program in Chile. She has taught a different universities in her country (Universidad de Chile, Diego Portales, Universidad de Santiago), and served as board member of NGOs and think tanks. During her professional career she has led both research and development projects in the areas of democracy, electoral and constitutional building processes, human rights including children´s and indigenous rights, gender representation and women´s empowerment. She served and aided high level policy reform commissions on electoral reform (2006), anticorruption (2015), pension reform (2014). She has played a key role in her country promoting legislative reforms to strengthen democracy, particularly in the areas of representation and participation; including to foster gender equality, electoral quotas and parity, reserved seats for indigenous peoples, political party regulation and finance, electoral systems, constitutional design.

She is the author of ¿Un nuevo silencio feminista? La transformación de un movimiento social en el Chile postdictadura. (Santiago, Historiográfica 2020). A series of UNDP reports on the state of democracy in Chile, as well as book chapters and articles in journals in Spanish, English and Portuguese on the feminist movement, gender quotas in Latin America and human rights.