Navi Pillay’s Nobel Prize and the convenient conscience of international law

A world that celebrates international justice while punishing the institutions entrusted with delivering it is profoundly dishonest. On October 9, South African jurist Navi Pillay was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for a lifetime devoted to human rights and international law. On that same day, the United States imposed sanctions on the International Criminal Court (ICC), where Pillay had once served as a judge. One institution was honouring the pursuit of accountability while one of the world’s most powerful governments was making that pursuit considerably more difficult.

The contradiction is almost too convenient. But before US President Donald Trump occupies yet another international headline, it is worth considering the woman whose work has brought us to this moment. Navanethem Pillay was born in Durban in 1941, when South Africa was already governed by racial segregation, later formalised under apartheid. As a woman of Indian descent, she entered a legal profession that was hardly designed to accommodate her. In 1967, she established her own practice in Natal, becoming the province’s first woman to do so. She represented anti-apartheid activists and fought for the rights of political prisoners, including challenging the conditions under which Nelson Mandela and others were held.

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We find this chapter of her career particularly important because it complicates the comforting assumption that the law is inherently just. Apartheid was not simply a collection of prejudices enforced by violent men. It was a system sustained through legislation, courts, administrative decisions and the machinery of the state. Discrimination had paperwork. Oppression had statutory authority. A lawyer confronting apartheid was therefore not merely fighting unlawful conduct. She was confronting laws that had made injustice perfectly legal. That distinction should trouble anyone who believes that legality alone confers legitimacy.

Pillay later became the first non-white woman appointed to South Africa’s High Court in 1995. But her contribution to international jurisprudence became especially significant at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, where she served as a judge and subsequently president. In 1998, the tribunal delivered its landmark judgment in Prosecutor v Jean-Paul Akayesu. For the first time, an international tribunal recognised that rape and sexual violence could constitute acts of genocide when committed with the requisite intent to destroy a protected group. Pillay was one of the judges who decided the case.

It is difficult to overstate the importance of this development. For generations, the rape of women during armed conflict had been documented, condemned and then pushed to the periphery of legal accountability. The suffering was acknowledged, but its relationship to the destruction of entire communities was inadequately recognised. The Akayesu judgment helped change that. What makes this jurisprudence especially consequential is that it required international criminal law to recognise violence against women not as an incidental tragedy of war, but as conduct capable of forming part of genocide itself. It also exposed how supposedly universal legal systems had historically reflected deeply selective understandings of whose suffering mattered.

Pillay’s subsequent appointments to the ICC and as United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights extended her influence beyond the courtroom. More recently, she chaired the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel. The Commission’s findings concerning Gaza, including its conclusion that Israel has committed genocide, attracted fierce criticism and rejection from Israel. These conclusions must be distinguished from a final judicial determination by the International Court of Justice. A UN commission of inquiry is not a criminal court, and its findings do not establish individual criminal guilt. Yet the controversy surrounding its work raises a question that deserves a serious answer: should the willingness to investigate alleged international crimes depend upon the political identity of those accused?

The answer cannot change according to the flag. The United States has long maintained objections to aspects of the ICC’s jurisdiction, particularly concerning nationals of countries that have not joined the Rome Statute. Those concerns are not automatically frivolous. International criminal jurisdiction raises difficult questions about consent, sovereignty and the limits of treaty-based institutions. Lawyers should engage with those arguments rather than dismiss them. But jurisdictional disagreement is one thing. Economic sanctions designed to constrain a judicial institution are quite another. If a government believes that a court has exceeded its authority, the appropriate response is to challenge its legal reasoning and jurisdiction. Punishing the institution, its personnel, or those who assist its work risks substituting economic coercion for legal argument.

The distinction matters because the ICC is already structurally vulnerable. It has no independent police force and depends on states to execute arrest warrants and cooperate with investigations. Its jurisdiction is limited, and its enforcement record reflects persistent inequalities in international power. Those weaknesses warrant reform and scrutiny. They do not make political interference by any country defensible.

On October 9, Canada, Denmark, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom issued a joint statement opposing American sanctions and reaffirming their support for the ICC. Their intervention was welcome, but statements are the easier part of defending the rule of law. The more demanding question is whether these governments will consistently support international accountability when investigations concern their own allies, military partnerships, or diplomatic interests.

This is where international law faces its most damaging credibility problem. States frequently insist upon universal principles while treating their application as negotiable. Sovereignty becomes sacred when scrutiny approaches home, but remarkably flexible when another country is under investigation. Accountability is celebrated as a civilisational achievement until it acquires inconvenient political consequences. Pillay’s Nobel Peace Prize should therefore provoke more than admiration for an exceptional legal career. Her work, from apartheid South Africa to Rwanda and the contemporary scrutiny of alleged atrocities, illustrates why international justice cannot be reduced to the preferences of governments. Courts and investigative bodies must be judged by their legal authority, evidence and procedures, not by whether their conclusions are diplomatically palatable.

We do not believe international law is beyond criticism. Its selective enforcement, dependence on state cooperation and limited ability to restrain powerful actors are serious defects. But the response to unequal justice cannot be to weaken the institutions that might eventually make justice more equal. The real question raised by Pillay’s Nobel is not whether the world admires her commitment to accountability. It is whether that commitment survives when accountability becomes politically expensive. Because a legal order that prosecutes the powerless while negotiating exemptions for the powerful is not yet a universal system of justice. It is a hierarchy with a law degree.

Barrister Noshin Nawal is a columnist for The Daily Star. She can be reached at nawalnoshin1@gmail.com.

Views expressed in this article are the author's own.

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