Navanethem  “Navi”  Pillay holds a B.A. LL.B. from Natal University South Africa, as well as a Master of Law and Doctorate of Juridical Science from Harvard University.

In 1967, she became the first woman to start a law practice in her home province of Natal, where she acted as a defence attorney for anti-apartheid activists, exposing torture and helping establish key rights for prisoners on Robben Island. She also worked as a lecturer at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. In 1995, after the end of apartheid, Ms. Pillay was appointed as acting judge of the South African High Court, and in the same year was elected by the UN General Assembly to sit as a judge on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), where she served a total of eight years, the last four (1999-2003) as President. She played a critical role in the ICTR’s groundbreaking jurisprudence on rape as genocide, as well as on issues of freedom of speech and hate propaganda.

In 2003, Navi Pillay was appointed as a judge of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, where she served in the Appeals Chamber until August 2008. Her appointment as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights followed in 2008, a post she was to hold until 31 August 2014. In April 2015, Ms. Pillay became the 16^th Commissioner of the International Commission against the Death Penalty. She was also named chair of the Special Reference Group on Migration and Community Integration in KwaZulu-Natal, a group formed to investigate the immediate and underlying causes of attacks on migrants.

In South Africa, as a member of the Women‘s National Coalition, she contributed to the inclusion of the equality clause in the country’s Constitution that prohibits discrimination on grounds of race, gender, religion and sexual orientation. She co-founded Equality Now, an international women‘s rights organisation, and has been involved with other organisations working on issues relating to children, detainees, victims of torture and domestic violence, and a range of economic, social and cultural rights.

Her current posts include Judge ad hoc of the International Court of Justice in the Application under the Genocide Convention by The Gambia against Myanmar, President of the International Commission against the Death Penalty, President of the Advisory Council of the Nuremberg Principles Academy and Trustee of the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal Foundation Board of Trustees.