New human rights chief takes up post

Navanethem Pillay, the United Nation's new High Commissioner for Human Rights, says she wants to be the “the champion of human rights in every part of the world.”

She will begin her four-year term on 1 September 2008 and brings to the position many years of direct experience working to protect and promote the rights of women, children, detainees, victims of torture, as well as a range of other economic, social and cultural rights.

Born in the South African city of Durban in 1941, the daughter of a bus driver, she was put through university thanks to donations from fellow members of the local Indian community.  Graduating with a law degree, Ms Pillay became the first woman to establish a legal practice in South Africa's Natal province.

“I had no choice,” she told the BBC. “No law firm would employ me because they said they could not have white employees taking instructions from a coloured person.”

Working as a lawyer under apartheid, Ms Pillay along with her black colleagues was not even allowed to enter a judge's chambers. However, during those 28 years she is credited with exposing torture and the poor conditions of political detainees held by the apartheid police.

Shortly after Nelson Mandela became President of South Africa in 1994, he nominated Ms Pillay as the first non-white woman on the country's High Court. It would be a short-lived appointment.

She was soon recruited to sit as a judge on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. While there she presided over landmark cases that established mass rape as a form of genocide. Since 2003 she has been a judge at the International Criminal Court working on its appeals panel.

Ms Pillay sees her new role as a return to her early days as an advocate.

"This is the only office at the UN to be fiercely uncompromising and independent about human rights standards,” she said. “The Commissioner is the voice of the victim everywhere.”

Ms Pillay, who replaces Canadian Louise Arbour, will be the fifth UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to be appointed since the office was founded 15 years ago. She will head an organisation that now has just under 1,000 staff working in 50 countries with a total annual budget of some US$ 150 million.

Biography

Born: 1941

Place of Birth and Nationality: South Africa

Education: University of Natal (BA & LLB); Harvard University (Masters and Doctorate in human rights and international law)

Career

2003-2008 – Appeals Division Judge, International Criminal Court in the Hague
1999-2003 – President, International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda
1995-1999 – Judge, International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda 1995; Acting Judge, Supreme Court of South Africa
1995 – Vice-President, University of Durban Westville
1985 – Co-founded international women's rights group Equality Now
1980 – Lecturer, University of KwaZulu-Natal
1967-1995 – Attorney and Conveyancer, High Court of South Africa
1967 – First woman to start a law practice in Natal Province, South Africa; defence attorney for many anti-apartheid activists.