Navi Pillay: Apologist for terror, not force for peace

OPINION:

In September 2023, I learned that the American Branch of the International Law Association, known as ABILA, had decided to bestow its highest award on South African international jurist Navi Pillay.

It was shocking and distressing to imagine such an upstanding institution awarding this individual any award, much less its highest. I was well aware of Ms. Pillay’s reprehensible past.

From 2008 to 2014, Ms. Pillay served as the United Nations high commissioner for human rights. Instead of promoting human rights, however, she used her position to attack Israel relentlessly. It became an obsession she has pursued to this day.

She has also served as a judge on the International Criminal Court and as president of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. As with her tenure at the United Nations, her time at the ICC further demonstrated how international legal institutions have become politically compromised.

I was especially aware of Ms. Pillay’s conduct as U.N. high commissioner for human rights, in which capacity she endorsed and championed the 2009 Goldstone Report, a shoddy, one-sided attack on Israel. Its tone was so biased, in fact, that its lead author, Justice Richard Goldstone of South Africa, later retracted its central finding that Israel had deliberately targeted civilians — though the report’s three other co-authors refused to follow, standing by all of the report’s conclusions.

Still, Ms. Pillay stuck with the discredited paper and repeatedly denounced Israel for “war crimes” while seeming to minimize Hamas’ violence.

Since then, Ms. Pillay has continued her spouting of vile invective against Israel, flagrantly defaming the Jewish state and undermining the rule of law in the process. Her conduct has not changed since Hamas’ massacre of Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023. To her, Hamas is always the victim; Israel, always the villain.

In October 2023, by providing evidence of Ms. Pillay’s betrayal of the principles underpinning international human rights, we persuaded ABILA to withdraw its award offer to her. To the immense credit of the organization, no award was given.

Having successfully persuaded fellow practitioners not to reward Ms. Pillay’s reprehensible distortion of legal principles and outright antisemitism, I assumed that Ms. Pillay would become the pariah she deserved to be within the international law community.

Imagine my shock when I was informed recently that she had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize by the Norwegian Nobel Committee.

It is difficult to express the disappointment that I have felt at the thought that one of our generation’s foremost apologists for Middle East terrorism has been given this honor. Anyone familiar with Ms. Pillay’s statements and actions cannot help but be profoundly stunned that she would be considered a promoter of peace and worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize.

Then again, this is not the first time that the committee has chosen a clearly unworthy individual for its prize. In 1994, it gave Yasser Arafat the award jointly with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres. Yet even that is more understandable than the current situation. At the time of his award, Arafat had signed the Oslo Accords with Israel more than a year earlier and professed peaceful intentions.

Many of us suspected that Arafat did not really intend to engage in a peace process, but presumed that perhaps the committee was trying to make him keep his word.

It was also difficult to understand the committee’s decision to award its prize to President Obama less than 10 months after his inauguration, before he had accomplished anything of substance. Once again, many of us presumed that the committee was attempting to use the prize as an incentive to pursue peace.

Yet in Ms. Pillay’s case, there can be no such motivation. The woman is 85. She is at the end of her career. What she is today, she will be to the end of her life. She is an apologist for Hamas terrorism and a purveyor of unremitting invective against Israel and, by extension, Jews.

There is simply no argument to support the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to this person.

It took courage and understanding on the part of ABILA’s leadership to withdraw its award offer to Ms. Pillay, and the organization is to be commended for it. For the Nobel committee, however, there appears to be no redemptive attribute. We must condemn the organization unequivocally for this action.

• Gerard Leval is a partner in the Washington office of a national law firm. His book “Lobbying for Equality: Jacques Godard and the Struggle for Jewish Civil Rights During the French Revolution” was published by HUC Press.