LOCAL RESEARCHERS - MALDIVES

Aishath Sheena Mohamed. Formerly a litigation lawyer and currently serving at the Legal Affairs Department at the President’s Office of Maldives, Ms. Aishath Sheena Mohamed has been engaged in training programs, facilitated by the Maldives Law Institute, aimed towards legal awareness.
During Ms. Mohamed’s time as a practicing attorney, she took on a number of pro bono cases, where she represented, in various capacities, marginalized people whose fundamental rights were at stake. Ms. Mohamed has remained consistent in advocating for justice sector reforms, which she believes to be pre-requisites for justice to be accessible for everyone in the society.
Ms. Mohamed aims to specialize in human rights law and is passionate about research and reforms on the subject.
Fathmath Yasmeen Shamaal is a licensed attorney, admitted to practice in the Republic of Maldives in 2018. Ms. Shamaal graduated from the University of Surrey with an LLB(hons) in 2017, and since then, she has been working in private practice in Maldives. She is currently an Associate at Salih, Shihab and Co LLP, where her main area of interest is medical law.
Ms. Shamaal is a Director of the Maldives Law Institute, and has been an active member of the NGO since 2017. She has organized several projects during her tenure there. Most notably, Ms. Shamaal is the project coordinator for the ‘Practical Legal Training’ programme, carried out with UNDP, where the organizations aim to train and empower community paralegals to ensure access to the legal system in the geographically remote islands of Maldives. She has also travelled to the islands as part of the programme, and conducted training workshops on various fields of law.
Maryam Manal Shihab graduated from the University of Queensland, Australia, with an LLB (Hons.), in 2009, and attained a Post Graduate Diploma in Legal Practice from the Queensland University of Technology, Australia in 2010. She is a registered solicitor at the Supreme Court of Queensland, Australia and a registered attorney in the Maldives.
After completing her studies, Ms. Shihab worked for an insurance litigation firm, HBM Lawyers, in Australia before returning to the Maldives where she joined the Ministry of Economic Development as the Legal Advisor to the Minister of Economic Development. Ms. Shihab subsequently worked at Dhivehi Raajjeyge Gulhun PLC, following which she joined the Maldivian law firm Suood & Anwar LLP, as a senior associate, in September 2013. She was appointed as a partner at the firm in early 2015, and she worked there until the end of 2017, where her primary focus of work was corporate law, employment law and tourism real estate.
In early 2018, Ms. Shihab went on to establish Salih, Shihab & Co., a law firm specializing in corporate and commercial practice.
She has been a member of the Maldives Law Institute since 2012, and currently serves on the Institute’s executive board. Ms. Shihab is also the author of the first comprehensive text on employment law in the Maldives, titled ‘Maldives Employment Law – With Emphasis on Private Sector Employment’, and published by the Maldives Law Institute in 2017.