Marta Santos Pais

Marta Santos Pais is a Portuguese lawyer who has been serving as the Special Representative of the United Nations Secretary-General on Violence against Children between 2009 and 2019.
Before her appointment, Marta Santos Pais was the Director of the UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre. She joined UNICEF in 1997 as Director of Evaluation, Policy and Planning.
Previously she was the Rapporteur of the Committee on the Rights of the Child and Vice-Chair of the Coordinating Committee on Childhood Policies of the Council of Europe. Santos Pais was a Special Adviser to the UN Study on Violence against Children and to the Machel Study on the Impact of Armed Conflict on Children.
Previously, Santos Pais was a Member of the Scientific Committee of the International Child Centre in Paris, and Visiting Professor at the International University in Lisbon, Portugal. In Portugal, she was Senior Legal Adviser for human rights in the Comparative Law Office and a member of the Portuguese Commission for the Promotion of Human Rights and Equality.
Santos Pais is the author of a large number of publications on human rights and children’s rights. She was a member of the UN Drafting Group of the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child and of its two Optional Protocols.