Navi Pillay

Former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights

Navanethem (Navi) Pillay was the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights between 2008 and 2014.

A South African national, she was the first woman to start a law practice in her home province of Natal in 1967. Over the next few years, she acted as a defence attorney for anti-apartheid activists, exposing torture, and helping establish key rights for prisoners on Robben Island.

She also worked as a lecturer at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, and later was appointed Vice-President of the Council of the University of Durban Westville. In 1995, after the end of apartheid, Pillay was appointed as acting judge on the South African High Court, and in the same year was elected by the UN General Assembly to be a judge on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), where she served a total of eight years, the last four (1999-2003) as President. She played a critical role in the ICTR’s groundbreaking jurisprudence on rape as genocide, as well as on issues of freedom of speech and hate propaganda. In 2003, she was elected as a judge on the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague, where she remained until August 2008.

In South Africa, as a member of the Women's National Coalition, she contributed to the inclusion in the country’s constitution of an equality that prohibits discrimination on grounds of race, religion and sexual orientation. She co-founded Equality Now, an international women's rights organization, and has been involved with other organizations working on issues relating to children, detainees, victims of torture and of domestic violence, and a range of economic, social and cultural rights.