Kate Dewes

Catherine "Kate" Frances Dewes (born 1953) is a New Zealand activist for disarmament and former advisor on peace matters to two United Nations Secretaries-General. She was appointed an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit in the 2001 New Year Honours, for services to the peace movement.

Education and early career Dewes grew up in a "conservative family" as one of eight siblings. Her father was a veterinary surgeon.

She was head prefect at Hamilton Girls' High School. After leaving school, she studied music at the University of Canterbury and became a music teacher at Epsom Girls' Grammar. Part of the school music curriculum was a song of lament about Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings. She joined a non-violent waterborne protest group called the Peace Squadron, aimed at preventing armed US warships from visiting Auckland Harbour. By 1983 public opinion had swung 72% in favour of banning warship visits.

Not long after, Dewes enrolled in a peace studies program at the University of Bradford, whilst juggling motherhood with a teaching career and a number of official positions and voluntary roles.

The senior journalist, Mike Crean, in an interview with Dewes after her New Year Honour, In 1988, she was part of a New Zealand Government delegation to the United Nations Special Session on Disarmament III, and while in New York, marched to promote New Zealand's nuclear-free zone and Nuclear Free New Zealand / Aotearoa.

She played a key role in the World Court Project that led to the 1996 historic advisory opinion by the International Court of Justice, in The Hague, which unanimously ruled that a threat to use and the use of nuclear weapons is generally illegal according to international law. She subsequently completed her doctorate at the University of New England in Australia, with a thesis entitled The World Court Project: The Evolution and Impact of an Effective Citizens' Movement.

Along with her husband, she is co-founder and co-director of the Disarmament & Security Centre (DSC), which they established at their home in Riccarton. She was also a director of the South Island Regional Office of the Aotearoa / New Zealand Peace Foundation and became Vice President of the International Peace Bureau in 1997. She and her husband were negotiators on the first legally-binding international treaty to comprehensively prohibit nuclear weapons. In the same year she and her husband were mentioned as potential Nobel Peace Prize contenders.