Navanethem Pillay tipped to become U.N. Human Rights Chief

[TamilNet, Friday, 18 July 2008, 10:42 GMT]
The South African judge Ms. Navanethem Pillay, who has served on the International Criminal Court since 2003, is expected to be proposed by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon as the candidate for UN's next Human Rights Chief, succeeding Louise Arbour, Reuters reported Friday. As a judge at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, where she served for eight years, Judge Pillay led the landmark decisions defining rape as an institutionalized weapon of war and a crime of genocide.

Ms. Pillay was the first non-white South African to earn a doctorate in Law from Harvard in 1982.

Judge Pillay became the first woman to start a law practice in Natal Province, South Africa in 1967. She defended and represented liberationists and activists in South Africa.

Los Angeles Times reported that Pillay was selected over two others by a committee that gave weight to geographic origin and gender as well as experience.

She was born in 1941 to South Africa's Tamil minority.