Nobel winner Navi Pillay challenges US to resume global human rights leadership after ICC sanctions

Nobel Peace Prize winner Navi Pillay urged the United States on Tuesday to return to its traditional role of defender of human rights and liberator for the rest of the world amid a US campaign 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, right after her Nobel Prize win 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.

"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 new sanctions were suspended for six months, and included some other exemptions for transactions for telecoms, software, payment of pensions and transactions related to detainees.

The US has long been hostile to the court, and especially the ICC statute that says it 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.