Mainstream WeeklyIn 2025, as Israel pulverized Gaza, leading jurist Navanethem Pillay, widely known as Navi, led a U.N. commission that found Israel guilty of committing genocide against Palestinians in the beleaguered strip. Israel bristled.
The former U.N. human rights chief also headed an international tribunal probing the 1994 massacres in Rwanda whose landmark ruling declared that widespread rape and sexual violence could constitute acts of genocide.
Closer to India, Pillay got into the bad books of the Sri Lankan government after demanding an international investigation into the final months of the war against the Tamil Tigers which reportedly led to the deaths of thousands of innocents.
On October 9, Pillay, the first non-white female judge of the High Court of South Africa, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2026 for her efforts to promote peace and international law. She is now aged 85.
A South African of Indian origin, Pillay also served as a judge of the International Criminal Court (ICC), a key reason the mercurial Donald Trump poured scorn on her and lashed out at the recognition given to her.
After first branding Pillay as a “mystery person” and asserting that he had “never heard of the person, nobody did,” Trump told an election rally that the Nobel Prize winner hated Israel.
Trump, who has made no secret of his desire to win the prestigious award, called the award to the highly respected jurist “a disgraceful and embarrassing decision” which he said left a stain on Norway.
The reality is that Pillay neither hates Israel nor Sri Lanka.
Born in Durban on September 23, 1941, Pillay’s grandparents, like so many poor from British India, migrated from then Madras Presidency to work as indentured labourers in white South Africa in the late 19th century.
After the grandparent lost both arms in an accident in a sugar mill, Pillay’s father, at the tender age of 8, was forced to quit school and work so that the hard-pressed family could survive.
He drove a bus and did other work. Although income was a constant problem, the parents ensured education to all their eight children, boys and girls. This is how Pillay, the fifth child, studied law.
Pillay was the first South African to earn a doctorate in law from Harvard Law School.
She became the first non-white woman to open a law practice in Natal in 1967. She spent the early part of her career defending activists fighting apartheid. This included the legendary Nelson Mandela and her own husband, Gaby Pillay, also a lawyer.
After apartheid ended, President Mandela appointed her to the High Court. She hasn’t looked back since then.
Today, Pillay is a judge on the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the U.N.’s main judiciary body, in a case brought by Gambia accusing Myanmar of genocide against the Rohingya Muslims. Like Israel, Myanmar denies any wrongdoing.
She was named the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights in 2008 just as the long-running war by the Sri Lankan military against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) was nearing its gory end.
When the Tigers were routed militarily, there was bloodbath. Thousands of non-combatants, almost all of them Tamils, were also killed, triggering serious concern.
Even as Colombo celebrated victory in May 2009, Pillay sought an independent and credible international investigation. She was fair and cited allegations against both the government forces and the Tamil Tigers.
She accused the government of using heavy weapons on the small and densely populated conflict zone after initially promising to protect civilians.
Pillay also charged the LTTE with preventing civilians as human shields and said the guerrillas fired at civilians as they fled the war zone.
As she spent a week in northern Sri Lanka in August 2013, including some of the worst hit areas in the war, government ministers unleashed a hate campaign against Pillay, repeatedly underlining her Tamil heritage.
The reality is that except her family origins, Pillai cannot speak Tamil. She had an interpreter while interacting with Tamil residents in Sri Lanka. One of the ministers, a Sinhalese, made a cheap sexist remark which drew widespread condemnation.
Without a care for the truth, a state-run Sri Lankan newspaper alleged that Pillay tried to pay a floral tribute to the dead LTTE leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran.
Some diplomats may have turned a deaf ear to the gibberish from Colombo. Pillay gave it back to her critics.
She said that while ministers called her a LTTE supporter, her only previous visit to Sri Lanka had been to attend a commemoration meeting in honour of Neelan Tiruchelvam, a Tamil MP and scholar assassinated by the Tigers.
Pillay called the LTTE “a murderous organisation” and pulled up members of the Tamil Diaspora who glorified the outfit after earning funding the Tigers’ separatist campaign.
Nobel Committee Chair Watne Frydnes described Pillay as “one of the most respected international jurists of our time” and said she was “instrumental in ensuring that war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide are prosecuted”.
Pillay, who will receive the prize in Oslo on December 10, dedicated her award to war crimes survivors around the world and criticised threats to the International Criminal Court (ICC) as attempts to weaken international criminal justice.
It should surprise none that Trump, who is poles apart from Pillay, hates the South African.