The International Criminal Court (ICC) on Friday welcomed the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to its former judge, Navanethem “Navi” Pillay. The honour showed the importance of international justice in securing lasting peace, the ICC said.
Pillay, 85, is a South African jurist of Indian-origin whose decades-long career has spanned South African courts, international tribunals and the United Nations. A prominent global human rights defender, she has served as a judge at the ICC and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and as the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights from 2008 to 2014.
The daughter of a bus driver, she studied law at the University of Natal before earning a master’s degree and doctorate from Harvard University. Born in 1941 to a Tamil family in Durban, South Africa, Pillay grew up under apartheid.
She condemned crackdowns on popular protests in the Arab world, including in Libya and Syria. The court has faced resistance from several countries, including the United States, Russia and Israel, which are not members and have challenged its jurisdiction in various cases. In 1995, a year after South Africa’s first democratic elections, Pillay became the first woman of colour to be appointed to the country’s High Court. Mandela subsequently recommended her for service on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, where she became one of the judges involved in a landmark case that recognised rape as an act of genocide in 1998. As UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, a position she held until 2014, Pillay emerged as a prominent voice against government repression and discrimination. Between 2021 and 2025, she chaired a commission of inquiry established by the UN Human Rights Council to investigate the root causes of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Pillay is also serving as an ad hoc judge at the International Court of Justice in a case concerning allegations that Myanmar violated the 1948 Genocide Convention through its treatment of the Rohingya minority.
