THE HAGUE: Nobel Peace Prize winner Navi Pillay urged the United States on Tuesday to resume its traditional role of defender of human rights and freedom for the rest of the world as Washington campaigns to undermine the International Criminal Court.
“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 is currently a judge at the United Nations’ highest legal body, the International Court of Justice.
Hours after Pillay was announced as the winner of the Peace Prize on Friday, the United States announced sweeping sanctions aimed at her former employer, the International Criminal Court. She said the timing of the sanctions, an unprecedented attack on an institution founded by international treaty, could not be coincidental.
“I think it’s very unfortunate. However, the plans of targeting international criminal justice through the ICC were brewing all the time,” Pillay said.
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“That’s why the first thing I did when I returned from Nuremberg to The Hague is to go to the staff of the ICC to show solidarity for their work in promoting international criminal justice and to protect those who’ve already been sanctioned.” US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Friday called the ICC a “rogue court” that would never be allowed to prosecute Americans. The sanctions included a six-month grace period, and some exemptions for transactions for telecoms, software, payment of pensions and those related to detainees.
The US has long been hostile to the court, especially the statute that says the ICC has jurisdiction not only over nationals of member states but also over others alleged to have committed atrocity crimes on the territory of member states. President Donald Trump was furious in particular with the arrest warrants issued in 2024 for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister Yoav Gallant, and the administration has in recent months escalated its campaign against the ICC.
Pillay last year chaired a UN Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory that concluded that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza. Israel dismissed the report at the time as “scandalous.”
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On Tuesday, Pillay called the backlash against the report “false propaganda by lobbies that promote Israel.”
Her first thought when she learned she had won the Nobel Peace Prize was that she was only the 21st woman to win it since 1901. “That in itself speaks to how entrenched inequality against women is.”
During her time as a judge on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in the 1990s, Pillay was part of a bench that issued a landmark judgment that rape and sexual violence could constitute acts of genocide.
Even now, she said sexual violence was still not being pursued enough in war crimes cases, in part because mainly male prosecutors believed that doing so would detract from their cases.
Rather than withdrawing into private life once she finishes her term at the ICJ, Pillay plans to work on addressing that issue: “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’.”