Pillay: From global rights activist to Nobel Prize winner

Nobel Peace Prize recipient Navi Pillay is a fearless global rights defender.

The 85-year-old former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights also served on the International Criminal Court and the International Tribunal for Rwanda.

She was also South Africa's first non-white woman High Court judge.

Ms Pillay built a formidable reputation during a decades-long career.

She gained global prominence for her outspoken condemnation of government repression of popular protests in the Arab world, including Libya and Syria.

Between 2021 and 2025, she chaired a panel - created by the UN Human Rights Council - to investigate the root causes of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory found that "genocide is occurring in Gaza and is continuing to occur", Ms Pillay said in 2025.

"The responsibility lies with the State of Israel," she added.

The commission, which does not speak for the UN, has faced harsh Israeli criticism,

Ms Pillay is currently an ad hoc judge at the International Court of Justice, working on a case deciding whether Myanmar's crackdown on the Rohingya minority breached the 1948 UN Genocide Convention, with a ruling expected in the coming months.

The Nobel winner - the daughter of a bus driver - was born in 1941 in the South African city of Durban to a family of Tamil descent.

She grew up in a poor neighbourhood during white minority rule.

Ms Pillay studied law at the University of Natal before achieving a master's and doctorate from Harvard University in the United States.

She became the first non-white woman to open a legal firm in Durban where she carved out a reputation as a strong defender of apartheid opponents.

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In 1973, Ms Pillay won the right for political prisoners on Robben Island - the notorious penal colony where anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela was held at the time - to have access to lawyers.

A year after Mr Mandela became president, in South Africa's first democratic vote in 1994, she made legal history by becoming the first woman of colour to be appointed to the country's High Court.

Soon after, the late liberation hero recommended her to serve on a UN tribunal trying Rwandan genocide suspects.

In 1998, she was among judges on the panel that was the first to try rape as an act of genocide.

Ten years later, Ms Pillay was appointed UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, a role she held until 2014.

Her upbringing in an unjust aparthied society spurred her to fight discrimination everywhere and earned her the reputation of being the voice of victims around the world.

"We put up with the worst insults and racial discrimination and abused and treated like dirt," Ms Pillay said in an interview in 2023.

That could have made you "weak and cry" or "fight every step of the way.

"So I always had a sense of confidence about who I am and how you confront any kind of discrimination.

"Open your mouth and speak up, condemning it. And that's what I did in the UN."

In 1965, she married lawyer Gaby Pillay, who was also a political prisoner.

She represented him while he was tortured in detention during apartheid rule.

The couple divorced and he died in the late 1990s. They had two daughters.