Mary Kerry Kennedy (born September 8, 1959) is an American lawyer, author, and human rights activist. Kennedy is a daughter of former United States Senator Robert F. Kennedy and Ethel Kennedy, and a niece of former U.S. President John F. Kennedy and former U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy. She is the president of Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, a non-profit human rights advocacy organization.

Mary Kerry Kennedy was born on September 8, 1959, in Washington, D.C., to parents Robert F. Kennedy and Ethel Skakel. Three days after her birth, her father resigned as chief counsel of the Senate Rackets Committee to run his brother's campaign for the presidency. Kennedy spent her childhood between the family's homes in McLean, Virginia and Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. She appeared at age 3 in the 1963 Robert Drew documentary Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment saying hello to U.S. Justice Department official Nicholas Katzenbach by phone from the office of her father, who was U.S. Attorney General at the time. Her father was assassinated in 1968. She is a graduate of The Putney School in Vermont and Brown University. She later received her Juris Doctor from Boston College Law School.

Kennedy's life has been devoted to equal justice, to the promotion and protection of basic rights, and to the preservation of the rule of law. Kennedy is the president of Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights. She started working in the field of human rights in 1981 as an intern with Amnesty International, where she investigated abuses committed by U.S. immigration officials against refugees from the Salvadoran Civil War in El Salvador.

For over thirty years, she has worked on diverse human rights issues such as children's rights, child labor, disappearances, indigenous land rights, judicial independence, freedom of expression, ethnic violence, impunity, and the environment. She has concentrated specifically on women's rights, particularly honor killings, sexual slavery, domestic violence, workplace discrimination, and sexual assault. She has worked in over 60 countries and led hundreds of human rights delegations.

Kennedy established the RFK Center Partners for Human Rights in 1986 to ensure the protection of rights codified under the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights. RFK Partners provides support to human rights defenders around the world. The Center uncovers human rights abuses such as torture, repression of free speech and child labor; urges Congress and the U.S. administration to highlight human rights in foreign policy; and supplies activists with the resources they need to advance their work. Kennedy also founded RFK Compass, which works on sustainable investing with leaders in the financial community. She started the RFK Training Institute in Florence, Italy, which offers courses of study to leading human rights defenders across the globe.

Kennedy is Chair of the Amnesty International USA Leadership Council. Nominated by President George W. Bush and confirmed by the U.S. Senate, she is on the board of directors of the United States Institute of Peace, as well as Human Rights First, and Inter Press Service in Rome, Italy. She is a patron of the Bloody Sunday Trust (Northern Ireland) and serves on the Editorial Board of Advisors of the Buffalo Human Rights Law Review. She is on the Advisory Committee for the International Campaign for Tibet, the Committee on the Administration of Justice of Northern Ireland, the Global Youth Action Network, Studies without Borders and several other organizations. She serves on the leadership council of the Amnesty International Campaign to Stop Violence Against Women and on the Advisory Board of the Albert Schweitzer Institute and the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center's National Advisory Council.

Lawyers for Ecuadorean plaintiffs in the long-running lawsuit against Chevron Corporation for environmental and human health damages at the Lago Agrio oil field hired Kennedy to conduct public relations for their cause. She traveled to Ecuador in 2009, after which she blasted Chevron in an article for the Huffington Post. Neither her Huffington Post piece nor the news coverage of her advocacy disclosed that she was being paid by the plaintiffs, a fact not made public until 2012. The plaintiffs' lead American lawyer reportedly paid Kennedy $50,000 in February 2010, and the plaintiffs' law firm budgeted $10,000 per month for her services, plus $40,000 in expenses in June 2010. Kennedy was also reportedly given a 0.25 percent share of any money collected from Chevron, worth $40 million if the full amount were to be collected. Kennedy responded that she was "paid a modest fee for the time I spent on the case," but denied that she had any financial interest in the outcome.

Kennedy has criticized the treatment of New York teenager Kalief Browder during his extended time in pretrial detention at Rikers Island. This included video recordings of guards beating Browder, withholding food, and denying medical treatment. In 2016, Kennedy campaigned for adoption of S 5998-A/A 8296-A, referred to as "Kalief's Law," in the [New York State Legislature], which would have guaranteed speedy trials to defendants being held in pretrial detention. On June 9, 2016, the New York State Assembly passed Kalief's Law by a 138-2 margin. The law was not voted on by the New York State Senate in 2016, and has been reintroduced by State Senator Daniel L. Squadron during the 2017-2018 legislative session as S 1998-A.