The new United Nations high commissioner for human rights, South African lawyer Navanethem Pillay, says she has “a real understanding of what it's like to have your human rights violated”

Navanethem Pillay is the new UN high commissioner for human rights. The General Assembly voted unanimously to confirm her nomination to the post.

Pillay, 67, who is from South Africa, will assume her new post in September 2008. She has been serving as a judge on the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague since 2003. She had earlier served both as judge and president of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, which she joined in 1995.

Pillay, who is of ethnic Tamil origin, became the first woman to start a law practice in South Africa's Natal Province in 1968. “I had no choice,” she told the BBC. “No law firm would employ me because they said they could not have white employees taking instructions from a coloured person.”

Working as a lawyer under apartheid, Pillay along with her black colleagues was not even allowed to enter a judge’s chambers. During those 28 years she is credited with exposing torture and the poor conditions of political detainees held by the police under the apartheid regime.

“I was representing men who were imprisoned on Robben Island along with Nelson Mandela,” she said. “They had no right to legal representation or even to know the rules of the prison. I was told by their wives just how bad conditions were.”

A successful appeal by Pillay to the provincial court gave Nelson Mandela and his fellow inmates some very basic legal rights. Shortly after Mandela became South African president in 1994, he nominated Pillay as the first non-white woman on the country’s high court, from where she went on to sit as a judge on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.

In 1992, she co-founded Equality Now which works for women's rights across the world. In 2003 she received the inaugural Gruber Prize for Women’s Rights.

Pillay says she will be able to perform better in her new assignment based on her own experience of living in South Africa during the apartheid regime. “I think I come with a real understanding of what it’s like to have your human rights violated and to have it violated for a very long time without any justice in sight. And the apartheid struggle taught that,” Pillay said in an interview with UN Radio.

Pillay says she sees her new role as returning to that of being an advocate. “This is the only office at the UN to be fiercely uncompromising and independent about human rights standards. The commissioner is the voice of the victim everywhere,” she told the BBC.

The UN Commission for Human Rights has a 1,000-strong staff based in Geneva, and a budget of $ 120 million.

Source: The Hindu, July 30, 2008
             Business India, July 28, 2008
              BBC News, July 28, 2008