Queen's Birthday Honours: Dame Silvia Cartwright, a trailblazer for women in our legal system

Judge and former Governor-General Dame Silvia Cartwright at her home in Auckland. Photo / Dean Purcell

A trailblazer for women in our legal system, Dame Silvia Cartwright was drawn to law because of the lack of career options open to her as a young female student.

The 78-year-old, who today was appointed to the Order of New Zealand, would go on to become New Zealand's first female High Court judge and to investigate war crimes in Cambodia.

The former Governor-General was also part of the United Nations investigation of alleged war crimes and human rights abuses in Sri Lanka, and currently chairs the executive board investigating international law breaches by North Korea.

Cartwright was born and raised in Dunedin and attended Otago University, where she graduated with a law degree in the mid-1960s.

"At my school, it was teaching, nursing or medicine, because I was at Otago, and I wasn't able or interested to do any of those, so I chose law," Cartwright told Newstalk ZB.

She said it had been pretty lonely and difficult being a woman lawyer but believed things have improved now and that it "unquestionably" was a wonderful profession for women.

Cartwright said there were still barriers and obstacles that women lawyers faced.

"It's common to most of the community these days and that's the barriers of sexual harassment, sexual attacks, bullying, racial discrimination, those sorts of things," she said.

"I suffered a bit of discrimination, but it was so overt, so out there that ... you knew what you were facing. These days it's much more difficult."

Her "favourite job" was with the war crimes tribunal in Cambodia but she's most proud of having performed the government inquiry into unethical research practices related to the treatment of cervical cancer at National Women's Hospital in 1988. The Cartwright Inquiry, as it became known, is regarded as a watershed moment for the rights of patients.

And Cartwright still has a lot on her plate.

"I can't say it's time to put my slippers on yet. I chair the International Commission of Jurors which is a long-serving group of imminent lawyers and judges throughout the world, I'm on the Administrative Tribunal of the Asian Development Bank, about to start a new job announced next week and various other things. So I am quite busy."

Cartwright, together with fellow Order of New Zealand appointee Sir Tipene O'Regan, leads this year's 187-strong Queen's Birthday and Platinum Jubilee honour list, which also includes three new Dames (Ruth Aitken, Judge Carolyn Henwood and Judith McGregor) and three new Knights (Patrick Hohepa, Hugh Rennie, Collin Tukuitonga).