Michael Higgins: A Nobel Peace Prize for defending rapists and murderers

There was something deeply unsettling and darkly ironic in former UN human rights chief Navi Pillay accepting her Nobel Peace Prize in Courtroom 600 at Nuremberg’s Palace of Justice last Saturday.

It was in that courtroom, after the Second World War, that senior Nazi officers were prosecuted during the Nuremberg Trials for crimes against humanity, including the killing of six million Jews in the Holocaust.

“As I was sitting in Courtroom 600, I see that we are continuing the work that started here in Nuremberg, in such a way that we are delivering anew on the ‘never again promise,’” she said, according to a statement from the Nobel Peace Center.

For someone who has often been denounced for being antisemitic, anti-Israel and pro-Hamas, it’s a wonder the phrase “never again” didn’t turn to ashes in her mouth.

The 85-year-old, from Durban, South Africa, has had a long, and sometimes distinguished, legal career. As a young lawyer she fought against apartheid and as a judge on the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda she helped establish that rape and sexual violence could constitute genocide.

“Navi Pillay’s commitment to justice and human dignity is a source of hope and inspiration to all who seek to bring about a more peaceful world,” said a statement from the Nobel committee.

Except there have been times when justice and human dignity didn’t seem to bother Pillay at all.

After Pillay became UN Commissioner for Human Rights in 2008 she was accused by a UN watchdog of a double standard by holding Israel to account for supposed crimes while completely ignoring many of the world’s worst human rights abusers.

UN Watch said in her first two years Pillay “turned a blind eye to most of the world’s worst abusers, being completely silent on abuses in Cuba, North Korea, Eritrea, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Belarus, Syria, and 27 other countries rated ‘Not Free’ by Freedom House.”

The independent NGO said Pillay issued 21 statements on countries in the Middle East and North Africa, of which nine targeted Israel.

In 2014, 100 members of the U.S. Congress sent a letter to Pillay saying the Human Rights Council “cannot be taken seriously as a human rights organization” because of its constant criticism of Israel while ignoring Hamas terrorism. Pillay denied the claim.

In 2025, leading the Commission of Inquiry on Occupied Palestinian Territories, Pillay issued a report denouncing Israel for committing “genocide” in Gaza.

But to read that report is to enter the Twilight Zone.

“On 7 October 2023, Israel launched its military offensive in Gaza, which included airstrikes and ground operations,” says the report without adding the necessary background. If all you had to read was the UN report one could be forgiven for believing that Israel, without provocation but with genocidal intent, launched a fierce and bloody war.

Why was it so difficult for Pillay to detail that earlier on that blood-soaked day, Hamas had gone on a slaughtering, torturing, maiming and raping rampage resulting in the death of 1,200 Israelis?

“You interpret the law, you look at all the facts, so that it’s impartial decision-making,” Pillay has said in defence of that report.

There is nothing impartial when you leave out the facts of Hamas’s butchery.

It is no wonder that Israel and Jewish organizations were horrified at Pillay’s award.

“B’nai B’rith International is appalled and dismayed by the selection of Navi Pillay for the Nobel Peace Prize. This choice is not only unwarranted but offensive and damaging. It cheapens the world’s leading prize for peacemaking and further reinforces a sense of isolation by Jews facing a surge in global antisemitism,” said the organization in a statement.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry attacked both Pillay and the Nobel committee. “When you pair Pillay’s blatant whitewashing of extremist regimes with her decades-long, obsessive crusade against Israel, the institution’s deep-seated bias becomes impossible to ignore,” it tweeted.

Shamefully, in 2011 Pillay aligned herself with countries such as China, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Iraq, when almost 20 nations boycotted the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony for Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo. China had repeatedly jailed the political and human rights activist for campaigning for democracy. Liu died in 2017 only weeks after being released from prison on medical grounds.

Pillay has also been accused by Emma Reilly, a human rights lawyer who worked with the UN chief, of being “complicit” in handing over the names of Uyghur dissidents to China.

“Navi Pillay oversaw the communication of names of over 50 dissidents to China,” Reilly tweeted. “They testified, under oath, to their family members being intimidated, arbitrarily detained, tortured, disappeared, and even killed in concentration camps.

“This is an absolute travesty of ‘peace.’”

In announcing the award, the Nobel committee said “the system of international law is under tremendous pressure, and its institutions are under attack. We see a shift towards power politics at the expense of legal frameworks and global respect for law and justice. Whenever might overtakes right, it undermines stability, trust and peaceful co-existence.”

But stability, trust and peace are also undermined when international jurists allow their prejudices to cloud their judgement and their biases to inform international reports.

At Nuremberg more than 80 years ago, prosecutor Robert Jackson said the men were on trial for “crimes against the peace of the world.” The men represented “sinister influences” and were “living symbols of racial hatreds, of terrorism and violence.”

What is Hamas but a sinister, living symbol of terrorism that hates Jews so much that it would destroy each and every one of them.

And yet Pillay would put Israel on trial.

National Post