US should become rights defender once more, Nobel peace laureate Pillay says
Nobel Peace Prize laureate Navi Pillay on Tuesday urged the United States to resume its traditional role as a defender of human rights and freedom worldwide as Washington intensifies its campaign against the International Criminal Court (ICC).
“My message is: ‘You have to get back to playing your serious role as a leader, playing a liberatory role for the rest of the world’,” Pillay, 85, told Reuters in The Hague, where she serves as a judge at the International Court of Justice, the United Nations’ highest judicial body.
Hours after Pillay was announced as the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, the United States announced sweeping sanctions targeting her former employer, the ICC.
Pillay said she believed the timing of the sanctions, which she described as an unprecedented attack on an institution established by an international treaty, was not coincidental.
“I think it’s very unfortunate. However, the plans of targeting international criminal justice through the ICC were brewing all the time,” she said.
Pillay said her first action after returning from Nuremberg to The Hague was to visit ICC staff to express solidarity with their work in promoting international criminal justice and supporting those who had already been sanctioned.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Friday described the ICC as a “rogue court” that would never be allowed to prosecute Americans. The sanctions included a six-month grace period and exemptions for certain transactions involving telecommunications, software, pension payments and detainees.
The United States has long opposed the ICC, particularly its statute granting the court jurisdiction over nationals of non-member states accused of committing atrocity crimes on the territory of member states.
President Donald Trump was particularly angered by arrest warrants issued in 2024 for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister, Yoav Gallant. His administration has intensified its campaign against the court in recent months.
Pillay chaired a United Nations Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory last year, which concluded that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza. Israel rejected the report at the time, describing it as “scandalous”.
On Tuesday, Pillay dismissed criticism of the report as “false propaganda by lobbies that promote Israel”.
Reflecting on her Nobel Peace Prize, Pillay said her first thought was that she was only the 21st woman to receive the award since its establishment in 1901.
“That in itself speaks to how entrenched inequality against women is,” she said.
During her tenure as a judge at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in the 1990s, Pillay served on a panel that delivered a landmark judgment recognising that rape and sexual violence could constitute acts of genocide.
She said sexual violence was still insufficiently prosecuted in war crimes cases, partly because some prosecutors, predominantly men, believed addressing the issue could detract from their cases.
Pillay said she intended to continue working to address the problem after completing her term at the International Court of Justice rather than withdrawing into private life.
“There is a solid base, laid not only by the Rwanda tribunal but by subsequent international tribunals, that you can no longer ignore sexual violence as collateral damage or as a ‘reward for soldiers’,” she said.
Credit: Reuters
