The Sydney Prize jury has announced the choice of UN High Commissioner Judge Navi Pillay as the recipient of the 2025 Sydney Peace Prize. The jury’s rationale and citation reads, “Navi Pillay, for a lifetime of advocating for accountability and responsibility in the face of crimes against humanity.”

In response to the announcement made by Melanie Morrison, director of the Sydney Peace Foundation and by Clover Moore, Lord Mayor of Sydney, patron of the Foundation, Navi Pillay said: “I am deeply honoured to accept Australia’s premier international prize for peace. The award is not mine alone. It belongs to all those who, across decades and continents, have stood up against injustice, often at great personal cost. It belongs to every survivor who found the courage to testify, to every human rights defender who remains steadfast in the face of threats of hostility and to every young person who dares to believe in a better, more just world.”

Commentators on the choice of Navi Pillay convey why her Sydney Peace Prize Lecture in the Sydney Town Hall, on Thursday 6 November, will show a life of courageous striving for the ideals of a common humanity, achievements which should give hope to generations and should be an inspiration to young people.

Professor Ben Saul, UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms while Countering Terrorism, said, “Navi Pillay is an icon of the international human rights movement, from confronting apartheid and promoting gender equality in South Africa to serving on the highest national and international courts.’

Lord Mayor Clover Moore explains, ‘The Sydney Peace Foundation honours judge Pillay for her unwavering commitment to human dignity and her profound impact on international human rights law.’

Evidence of such judgments is easily found in Pillay’s career. Born into a Tamil family living under South African apartheid, she became the first non-white woman to open a law practice in Natal Province and the first non-white woman judge of the High Court of South Africa.

Attaining those positions required gutsy determination to overcome discrimination and prejudice. She recalls, “As a child in South Africa, I could not enter parks or beaches reserved for whites.

“When I became a lawyer, no-one would hire me because of my gender, the colour of my skin and my economic status. I was told that white secretaries would not like to take dictation from a black woman.”

Pillay came to global attention in her early 30s when she won a legal case for recognising the rights and better living conditions for South African dissidents jailed under apartheid’s Terrorism Act. In a subsequent Robben Island case, she challenged the Terrorism Act and, for the first time, provided concrete evidence that prisoners had been tortured.

The centrality of human rights

Pillay’s career and the achievements which impressed a Sydney jury revolve around a commitment to a philosophy, language and practice to promote universal human rights. She explains, “There can be no lasting development in a given society without respect for all human rights, economic, social and cultural as well as civil and political rights.”

Armed with that philosophy, she has campaigned against violence against women and the need to abolish harmful practices, female genital mutilation and forced child marriages. In her hopes about the future, she imagines, “The world needs coalitions to create a more values-led, ethical globalisation, and, in particular, in a century when women can make a difference.”

Promotion of human rights as the means of attaining human dignity echoes a theme expressed by Pillay’s illustrious predecessor, Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland, former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and recipient of the Sydney Peace Prize in 2002. In Sydney, 23 years ago, Robinson was rewarded for “courage in standing up for the powerless against the interests of powerful individuals and institutions”.

She reminisced that in Ireland, human rights abuses had precipitated the conflicts and in the eventual process of peace through reconciliation and bridge-building, restoration of human rights became both goal and potential panacea. The Northern Ireland Good Friday Agreement, signed on 10 April 1998, confirmed Robinson’s judgment.

Never shirking responsibility to adjudicate abuses of power

Exercising similar views and skills, from 1995-2003, Pillay became a judge and then president of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, created to adjudicate people charged with the Rwandan genocide and other human rights violations. Other positions with worldwide responsibilities included her appointment as a judge in the International Criminal Court and as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights 2008-2014.

An Australian audience in November will also be able to hear Pillay’s judgment about death and destruction in Gaza and on the West Bank. As chair of the UN Commission inquiring into war crimes in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Pillay has found that Israeli forces have committed gender-based violence with intent to humiliate and further subordinate the Palestinian community. UN experts have concluded that genocidal acts were evident in the destruction of maternity wards in Gaza, of reproductive health care facilities and embryos at a fertility clinic.

Chris Sidoti, the Australian lawyer colleague of Pillay’s on the Commission, concludes, “Sexual violence is now so widespread that it can only be considered systematic. It’s got beyond the level of random acts by rogue individuals.”

Pillay writes, “The evidence collected reveals a deplorable increase in sexual and gender-based violence to terrorise Palestinians and perpetrate a system of oppression that undermines their rights to self-determination.”

In this most recent, demanding judicial role, Pillay displays her life enhancing manner of exercising power, not from the top down but always with respect to evidence, to the needs and hopes of vulnerable usually powerless people.

She also has a reputation for kindness and warmth to all whom she encounters, whatever their status. Her courage in public life appears influenced largely by her legal knowledge and judicial skills, but to emphasise that dimension of her work would mean overlooking the tenets of humour, humility and a basic humanity, without which we are all lost.

That will no doubt be her message to Australians at an award dinner in Sydney on 5 November and at the Sydney Peace Prize Lecture. Both events could generate optimism, offering a sense of hope and each would show, in memorable ways, the style and content of visionary leadership.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.