Diane Lebowitz

We are shocked that the Nobel committee honored Navi Pillay. Her troubling record on antisemitism and gross breach of ethics in presiding over a notorious UN commission utterly disqualifies her from such an award. The Nobel Peace Prize should uphold universal human rights and reject antisemitism unequivocally. Honoring Pillay without confronting this record undermines those principles and risks rewarding prejudice rather than advancing peace. In July 2021, Ms. Pillay accepted to chair a Pakistani-sponsored UN Commission of Inquiry into alleged Israeli crimes. The rules of due process require that fact-finders in the human rights field be impartial. Yet prior to accepting this post, Pillay had publicly pronounced herself, in extreme terms, on the very issues that her inquiry is mandated to investigate. In June 2020, she signed a manifesto calling on governments to “Sanction Apartheid Israel.” In June 2021, a month before heading the inquiry, Pillay wrote a letter to President Biden calling to punish Israel for the May 2021 war with Hamas. She has made many more prior prejudicial pronouncements. (See: unwatch.org/wp-content/uploa…) This not all. In July 2022, Pillay’s fellow commissioner Miloon Kothari railed against “the Jewish Lobby” and questioned Israel’s right to be a member state of the UN. Mr. Kothari was condemned by the world’s leading democracies, and by top UN officials including Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Astonishingly, however, Navi Pillay defended him. For those reasons, the Mayor of Berlin in 2022 withdrew her support for a town hall event set to honor Navi Pillay, and the award was canceled. By honoring Pillay, the Nobel committee has failed to uphold the principles it seeks to celebrate. International justice depends on impartiality. When an investigator campaigns to punish a country before examining the evidence, she compromises the credibility of both her findings and the institution she represents. Pillay’s defense of a colleague who invoked “the Jewish lobby” is especially disturbing. A human rights leader should recognize and unequivocally reject antisemitic stereotypes. Her response instead helped shield her colleague from accountability. The Nobel committee should have confronted that record before presenting her as a model of integrity. The victims of discrimination deserve institutions that apply the same standards to everyone. Today’s decision sends the wrong message: that achievements elsewhere excuse prejudice against Jews and the abandonment of basic standards of fairness when investigating Israel. That weakens the cause of universal human rights.