An interview with #Navi_Pillay
A refusal to shrink from difficult confrontations is a recurring theme in Navi Pillay’s career. During her six years as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights she took on the then Sri Lankan president Mahinda Rajapaksa for failing to investigate the deaths of over 100,000 people in the last weeks and months of the country’s civil war, which ended in 2009 after 26 years. In response, the Sri Lankan government said that South African-born Pillay lacked objectivity because of her Tamil ancestry. An Indian diplomat told Pillay that her campaign to end caste discrimination was unfair because it humiliated India on a world stage. A Syrian ambassador called her a “lunatic”. Some western countries (including the UK) complained when she pointed out their failures to uphold certain human rights. “They said I should be focusing on distant countries where thousands of people are killed,” she said. “In other words, developing countries.”
▻http://lacuna.org.uk/justice/interview-navi-pillay
#femmes #racisme #xénophobie #droits_humains #témoignages #féminisme #Afrique_du_Sud #apartheid
Sur le #viol et les #viols_de_guerre :
This was after all how she was able to challenge the law on sexual violence in conflict, by listening to the testimony of rape survivors and drawing on the work of experts.
“I got a great deal of help from academics on creating this new jurisprudence, the gender jurisprudence. I felt in my heart that we have to render justice. That is what we are there for, to render justice and so if a woman complains about a brutal rape, we have to pay attention.”