Navanethem ‘Navi’ Pillay. File
| Photo Credit: AP

Navanethem “Navi“ Pillay
| Photo Credit: AP

Last week, the United Nations Independent Inquiry Commission on the Occupied Palestinian Territory announced its findings that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, making it the first UN-affiliated body to do so. Leading the charges against Israel is Navi Pillay, the Commission’s chairwoman and an international jurist of repute with several roles under her belt.

Navanethem ‘Navi’ Pillay was born in 1941 in apartheid-era South Africa to Indian parents of Tamil descent. She received her BA and LLB degrees from the University of Natal. In later years, she also earned a Master of Law and a doctorate from Harvard University. In 1967, Ms. Pillay became the first woman to start a law practice in Natal, her home province. Her early years saw her defending anti-apartheid activists and advocating for prisoners’ rights. She helped establish rights, including access to legal representation and basic amenities, for prisoners on Robben Island in 1973.

The first democratic government in South Africa was set up under Nelson Mandela post the end of apartheid in 1994. Ms. Pillay was appointed Acting Judge of the High Court of South Africa in 1995, becoming the first non-White woman in this role. The same year, she was also elected as a judge on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, serving for eight years, with four of them as president (1999-2003). During her time on the Tribunal, Ms. Pillay contributed to jurisprudence on propaganda, free speech and crimes of sexual violence in conflict, including rape as part of genocide.

“The judicial panel over which I presided convicted three Rwandans of genocide. So I understand the word “genocide,” and it is not one I use lightly,” Ms. Pillay wrote in an opinion piece for The New York Times on September 16, 2025.

ICC judge

In 2003, Ms. Pillay was appointed as a judge on the International Criminal Court in the Hague, where she served until August 2008. Following this, she became the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and served a six-year term, till 2014.

Along with extensive writing and practice in international criminal law and human rights law, Ms. Pillay has worked for the rights of women and children, detainees, and victims of torture and domestic violence. As a member of the Women’s National Coalition, she contributed to the cause of gender equality in South Africa, pushing for the inclusion of the clause prohibiting discrimination on the grounds of race, religious, sex or sexual orientation in the country’s constitution. She also co-founded Equality Now, which works to advance women’s legal rights.

Earlier this year, Ms. Pillay received the 2025 Sydney Peace Prize for “a lifetime of advocating for accountability and responsibility in the face of crimes against humanity.”

She heads the three-member Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, which was established by the UN Human Rights Council in 2021, with panelists appointed by the 47 member states. The other members are Miloon Kothari, an Indian expert in land rights and housing who served as the first UN Special Rapporteur on adequate housing and Chris Sidoti, an Australian international human rights lawyer who has held multiple roles in the UN, including as founder and expert member of the Special Advisory Council for Myanmar. All three members will end their term later this year, having submitted their resignations in July. Ms. Pillay, 83, cited her “age, medical issues and the weight of several other commitments,” as her reasons for stepping down. The Commission’s latest report, “the strongest and most authoritative UN finding to date,” finds reasonable grounds to conclude that four of five acts constituting genocide, as defined under the 1948 Genocide Convention, are being carried out against a national, ethnic, racial or religious group (here, by the state of Israel against Palestinians in Gaza) since the start of the war in 2023. The four acts are: killing members of a group, causing serious bodily and mental harm to them, deliberately inflicting conditions calculated to physically destroy the group, and imposing measures intended to prevent births. The report concluded genocidal intent from statements by Israeli leaders such as President Isaac Herzog, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, and the actions of the Israeli Defence Forces.

More than 64,000 people have been killed and thousands injured in Gaza since the start of the war, which followed a Hamas-led attack in Israel on October 7, 2023 that killed around 1200 people, and saw 251 taken hostage. There has been mass displacement, destruction of civil infrastructure and a famine in Gaza City.

“The international community cannot stay silent on the genocidal campaign launched by Israel against the Palestinian people in Gaza,” Ms. Pillay said at a press conference in Geneva announcing the launch of the report. “When clear signs and evidence of genocide emerge, the absence of action to stop it amounts to complicity.”

Israel has denounced the report as distorted and false, with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs alleging in a post on X that the report’s authors were serving as Hamas proxies. Israel has characterised its actions as prompted by self-defence, and maintains that they are consistent with international law. Its foreign ministry has demanded that the Commission should be abolished after its members step down from their roles later this year.

Notably, the Commission does not speak for the UN, which maintains that a legal determination about whether a situation constitutes genocide under international law can only be made by a competent court. The ICJ is currently hearing a genocide case against Israel brought by South Africa; any resolution, however, may take years.

Published – September 21, 2025 01:22 am IST