Navanethem Pillay is a South African jurist of Indian Tamil origin who served as the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights from 2008 to 2014. She obtained a BA from the University of Natal in 1963, and an LLB in 1964 before attending Harvard Law School for her LLM. She obtained her Masters at Harvard in 1982 and received a doctorate in law from the same institution in 1988. In 1967, Pillay became the first non-white woman to open up a law practice in the Natal Province of South Africa. She served as a lawyer for 28 years, defending anti-apartheid activists and fighting for the right of those detained on Robben Island to have access to lawyers. Pillay co-founded the women’s rights group ‘Equality Now’.

In 1995, Pillay was elected as the first non-white woman and the first attorney to serve on the High Court of South Africa, before swiftly being elected by the United Nations General Assembly to serve in the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). Pillay served at the ICTR for eight years, the last four of which were spent as President of the tribunal. While at the ICTR she made groundbreaking judgments, establishing mass rape as a war crime, convicting a former politician for committing war crimes, and condemned the media for its role in instigating genocide.

Pillay was appointed as a judge of the International Criminal Court in 2003, where she served in the Appeal Chamber until 2008. Pillay was nominated as High Commissioner for Human Rights on July 24th, 2008 and the nomination was confirmed four days later. In her time as High Commissioner, she spoke up in support of gay rights being treated as human rights.