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# In Tribute to Neelan Tiruchelvam, Nobel Laureate Navi Pillay Said War Crimes Courts Depend on Political Will
- URL: https://www.jaffnamonitor.com/featured/in-tribute-to-neelan-tiruchelvam-nobel-laureate-navi-pillay-said-war-crimes-courts-depend-on-political-will/
- Published: 2026-10-10T19:16:36.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-10T19:22:42.000Z
- Author: Our Reporter
- Tags: JM Exclusive, October 2025

**JAFFNA, Sri Lanka —** Navanethem Pillay, who on Friday became the first person of Tamil heritage to win the Nobel Peace Prize, said in an address honoring the slain Tamil legislator Neelan Tiruchelvam that over the past 50 years the international community had responded to crimes against humanity with "tolerance of impunity rather than enforcement of the rule of law."

The Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded Ms. Pillay, 85, the prize for her efforts to promote peace and international law, saying she had held states and national leaders accountable. She was born in Durban in 1941 to descendants of Tamil immigrants from southern India and is the fifth South African to receive the Peace Prize. Earlier Nobel laureates of Tamil origin, including the physicists C. V. Raman and Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, were honored in the sciences.

Ms. Pillay delivered the inaugural address at a conference commemorating Mr. Tiruchelvam, a constitutional lawyer and member of Parliament who was killed in Colombo on July 29, 1999, by a suicide bomber from the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. She was then a judge on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. The address, titled "Accountability for Human Rights Abuses of Both State and Non-State Actors in the Context of Peace and Reconciliation," was published in the conference papers by the International Centre for Ethnic Studies, the Colombo institute Mr. Tiruchelvam founded.

She said she had known of Mr. Tiruchelvam through their links with Harvard Law School and the United Nations, and through his reputation in the human rights movement, including in South Africa. "Neelan was a role model," she said. "Throughout his life, he demanded accountability for human rights abuses of both state and non-State actors in the context of peace and reconciliation."

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/aa/f0aaf7b7-6b61-437a-846a-1a80de683912/content/images/2026/10/WhatsApp-Image-2026-10-10-at-11.14.04-1.jpeg)

The cover of the conference proceedings published by the International Centre for Ethnic Studies in memory of Neelan Tiruchelvam, featuring an address by Navi Pillay on accountability for human rights abuses by state and non-state actors.

Looking back on the 20th century, she said it had produced both the greatest achievements and the greatest violations in history. "Millions of innocent people have been ruthlessly slaughtered, and gross human rights abuses have occurred without accountability," she said. The Holocaust had inspired the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, she noted, but genocidal campaigns had since taken millions more lives, in Cambodia and in Rwanda. "There are no geographical boundaries to the killing and other atrocities which have taken place, both during war and during so-called 'peace,'" she said.

Ms. Pillay said the rule of law had emerged as a real response to such crimes only in the previous decade, through the U.N. tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda and the new International Criminal Court. The concept of individual criminal responsibility at the international level, she said, "is finally taking hold."

She was critical of the failure to arrest suspects indicted by the tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. The court had indicted 84 people, she said, but Radovan Karadzic, Ratko Mladić and Slobodan Milosevic remained fugitives.

"In my view too little has been done by the international community to secure these arrests," she said. "We have to question whether this reluctance to bring such leaders to trial has fuelled the fire of further campaigns of aggression in the region."

Because the tribunals were created through a political process and had no independent means of enforcement, she said, they were "to a great degree dependent on political will for their success." International law had great potential to deter abuses and hold perpetrators accountable, she said, but "it must be seen as impartial and unbending to political considerations."

She also questioned why only the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda had been given tribunals. "There is no inherently compelling logic to the selection," she said, describing the choices as "essentially political decisions made at certain moments in time." The Rwanda court could not act on new crimes in the Great Lakes region because its jurisdiction was limited to 1994\. Those limits, she said, showed the need for an International Criminal Court with universal jurisdiction, which would be "somewhat insulated from sudden and potentially arbitrary or biased waves of concern."

Ms. Pillay gave a broad definition of state-sponsored violence. It includes abuses by police, soldiers, prison guards and other officials, custodial violence in prisons and hospitals, and cases where a state "is under legal obligation to protect the individuals within its jurisdiction and has not been diligent in doing so." When states are "unable or unwilling to protect human rights," or when authoritarian regimes abuse sovereign power to commit large-scale violations, she said, "such circumstances provide the legal and institutional construction for intervention."

She cited the Rwanda tribunal's statute, under which official position, including that of a head of state, does not relieve an accused person of criminal responsibility. Superiors are liable for crimes by subordinates if they knew or had reason to know of them and failed to prevent or punish them. Acting on orders is no defense, though it may be considered in reducing a sentence. "This lays the basis for 'command responsibility'; and liability of state actors for state-sponsored violence," she said.

Ms. Pillay also listed the shortcomings of the Nuremberg trials after World War II. Prosecuting only one side of the conflict led to the charge of "victor's justice," she said. "Crimes of violence against women were not prosecuted. Fair trial and due process, as we understand it, were lacking."

International treaties contained few prohibitions on sexual assault, she said, because the laws "were written by men, and militants, whose preoccupation was to win wars – not to protect human rights." She pointed to a gap in her own court's statute, which treats rape as a crime against humanity only when it is part of an attack on national, political, ethnic, racial or religious grounds. If women were attacked because they were women, she said, "the rape will not constitute a crime against humanity."

She described the Rwanda tribunal's record. It held 38 people in custody, among them "virtually the entire political leadership" of the forces accused of killing hundreds of thousands of people within 100 days. It had delivered six judgments, with sentences ranging from 15 years to life imprisonment, including against Jean Kambanda, the former prime minister, who pleaded guilty, and Jean-Paul Akayesu, the former mayor of Taba. The court, she said, had defined rape under international law for the first time and "clearly established that rape can constitute a form of genocide." She called the cases "the new accountability of political leadership."

As United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Ms. Pillay later called for an independent international investigation into the final phase of Sri Lanka's war. During a visit to the country in 2013, she told reporters in Colombo that her only previous trip to Sri Lanka had been to attend a commemoration of Mr. Tiruchelvam.

She ended the address with her assessment of where international justice stood. "Institutional protections such as sovereign immunity are finally coming under serious question, and institutional mechanisms are finally becoming available to hold those accountable, even at the highest level, for human rights violations," she said. "We have a long way to go in establishing the rule of international law to hold both state and non-state actors accountable for human rights abuses."