Navi Pillay, the newly appointed United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, is for the underdog. Ever since she became the victim of a robbery at the tender age of six she vowed to defend the less fortunate.
The epiphany for Pillay occurred when her housewife mother sent her to meet her father’s bus along the main road to deliver some money to him. The bus conductor snatched the money from her tiny hand and ran off. The whole debacle, says Pillay, led to a court case and the eventual prosecution of the conductor concerned.
The treatment meted out to her father during that experience stuck with her and would shape her choices from then on in apartheid South Africa. “The police, I thought, were shouting at my father and that upset me so much. He is my father, I respect him so much and somebody else treated him like dirt. So I kept a watch out for that, of course. I think every child growing up in South Africa [then] became aware of injustice.”
The logical conclusion to draw from her father’s experience, she says, was that it was important to know one’s rights.
Pillay was, after all, the “underdog” in apartheid South Africa. “And you are aware of your whole community and the conditions they live in.”
About four years later she wrote an essay about justice and “a black and white person being sentenced to different terms”.
At the age of 13 she knew she wanted to be a lawyer and boldly announced it to one of her teachers, who retorted that her father must have lots of money as a university education would be costly.
Growing up as she did in what she describes as “a slum” just outside Durban it could have been a tough ask. But her school principal noticed her potential and urged her Clairwood community to cobble together some money for her education. Educating women at the time, she says, was unheard of. The majority of her friends had to leave primary school for marriage.
Pillay would become an exception largely because of a “progressive father, who said all children are equal”, and a supportive mother, who wanted for her children the privileges she had been denied.
“My mother used to tell us all the time her father said ‘you can’t go to school to learn to write, you will write letters to boys’, so she said you have to get an education,” says Pillay.
On to the blacks-only section of the University of Natal she went and diligently completed her Bachelor of Law (LLB) degree in five years. During this time Pillay became involved in struggle politics in the company of the likes of Constitutional Court President and Chief Justice Pius Langa and KwaZulu-Natal Judge President Vuka Tshabalala.
Pillay hastens to say though: “We did it in small, tentative ways.”
She opened her own legal practice and for 28 years practised as a human rights lawyer, fighting for the rights of those waging the liberation struggle against the apartheid government.
It was during this time that she met an activist who would inspire her to take a decision that would catapult her into a distinguished career in international human rights law.
While defending nine ANC members in a terrorism trial, Pillay had the opportunity to visit the group in Robben Island.
“Don’t feel responsible for our conviction you did your best, you must remember this is a political struggle and this is a political trial,” one of the detainees, the late ANC stalwart Henry Gwala, told Pillay at the time.
Gwala went on to plant the idea of exploring foreign legal jurisdictions, an idea that saw Pillay complete two post-graduate degrees at ivy-league Harvard University.
In 1981 she studied for her master’s degree in law and followed this three years later with a doctorate, putting her well on the path to her appointment to the high court in KwaZulu-Natal in 1995.
“Really I must thank Harry Gwala for putting the idea in my head,” says Pillay.
This week 67-year-old Pillay became the first African woman to be appointed as United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. The appointment is another first in Pillay’s list of firsts. Back in 1967 Pillay was the first black woman to open her own law firm and in 1995 she was the first black woman to occupy a seat on a high court Bench.
Her time on the KwaZulu-Natal high court Bench was short, though. After the disappointment of not being appointed to the Constitutional Court Pillay says there were increasing calls from the international community for her to make herself available for a seat on the newly formed International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.
She heeded the call and was appointed to the court, with its seat in the city of Arusha, in Tanzania. She served two terms of four years each on the court, including one as president. This was before moving to the appeals division of the International Criminal Court in The Hague. She has resigned from this position to take up her new human rights champion role in early September.
Her Harvard training in international human rights, Pillay says, came in very handy during her time on the tribunal. She went on to play an instrumental role in the precedentsetting case against Jean Paul Akayesu, which not only defined rape in the context of international law but also went on to rule that rape and sexual assault can be considered acts of genocide.
Pillay says she recently attended two conferences that commemorated the 10th anniversary of the case, which has seen two states in the United States changing their laws.
“Of course our own South African Constitutional Court consulted my jurisprudence in two cases which resulted in the new sexual offences Bill,” says Pillay.
She ruled in another landmark case on the Rwanda tribunal, which declared that the media, in this instance radio, can be used as a tool to incite genocide.
In her new role Pillay says she will be speaking up for victims and against “violators”.
“My focus will be to look whether the result will bring benefit to victims.”