Human rights restored

Navi Pillay is a deserving Nobel Peace Prize winner

In an ideologically fractured world, the award of the Nobel Peace Prize often attracts controversy. Last year, for instance, the award to a Venezuelan Opposition leader, the right-wing Maria Corina Machado, met with substantial reservations from global liberal establishments. The reservations were confirmed when she gave her medal to United States (US) President Donald Trump after he had invaded her country and captured its President. Mr Trump, of course, thinks he was due to receive the “Noble Prize”, as he termed it, for “stopping eight wars” — though his machinations in West Asia have sent the region and the global economy into turmoil for the foreseeable future. But, barring Mr Trump and the Israeli ruling establishment, few people would quibble with this year’s winner, South Africa’s Navanethem “Navi” Pillay, 85, human rights jurist extraordinaire.

 

Ms Pillay heard she had got the award when the citation was read in Norway, and her response reveals a wry sense of humour. At  the Nuremberg Palace of Justice — where the first Holocaust trials were held —  she initially thought it was a joke and then told those who had gathered to applaud her that she might share the prize with Mr Trump if they clapped a little harder. But the gravity of the issue for which Ms Pillay won the award is not in doubt. It comes at a time when the world is facing more war and conflict than it has seen in a long time and when the bastion of democratic freedom, the US, is committing human rights violations on its own soil. Ms Pillay’s sterling contribution to shaping the multidimensional facets of human rights law deserves the highest recognition. Most recently (2021-25), she chaired the United Nations (UN) independent enquiry commission on Occupied Palestinian Territory, which accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. This finding contradicted entrenched Western assumptions (and tacit approval) of Israel’s actions and marked the first official recognition of Israel’s disproportionate response, especially in targeting Palestinian children, following the Hamas massacre of October 7, 2023.

 

Ms Pillay, granddaughter of Indian indentured labourers, is the fifth South African to win the Nobel Peace Prize. She shares the honours with Albert Luthuli, Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela and F W de Klerk. Apartheid was the leitmotif on which she built her work as a human rights champion. She was the only non-white woman to open her own law practice in Natal province, principally because no law firm wanted its white employees to take instructions from a woman of colour. As a lawyer, she defended several apartheid detainees, including Nelson Mandela, and exposed the use of torture against them. Ms Pillay later graduated from Harvard Law School and became a high court judge after the African National Congress came to power. Her work in the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda brought women’s rights front and centre of human rights debate for the first time by recognising that rape and sexual assault could constitute acts of genocide. Her subsequent work on gender justice at the International Criminal Court — which, ironically, India does not recognise — and focus on caste discrimination as UN Human Rights Commissioner (2008-14) added new dimensions to the issue. By recognising Ms Pillay, who serves as an ad hoc judge at the International Court of Justice in the genocide case against Myanmar over its treatment of the Rohingyas, the Nobel committee has delivered a much-needed restorative to the primacy of human rights in the global discourse.