Inside Geneva talks to Navi Pillay: from the apartheid regime to the UN

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On Inside Geneva this week: part four of our series marking the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Imogen Foulkes talks to Navi Pillay, who served as UN Human Rights Commissioner from 2008 to 2014.

She started life in racially segregated South Africa. “We grew up under apartheid and we’re realised there’s something very unfair here. Our teachers were afraid to talk about…you know they would teach us democracy in Greece, but not why don’t we have democracy in South Africa.”

She became the first woman of colour to have her own legal practice in South Africa.

“It was so lonely, and so scary. I had very little choice, because I went looking for jobs after I’d qualified, at law firms, they were mainly white law firms, and they would say ‘we can’t – you’re a black person, so we can’t have our white secretaries taking instructions from you’.”

She served on the international tribunal for the Rwandan genocide – but hesitated when Ban Ki Moon asked her to become UN Human Rights Commissioner. 

“You have to respond to a call that’s made to you, a trust that people place in you. So if you ask me what moved me from where I wanted to go to this, it was the Secretary General saying ‘we need you now’.”

Today, she believes the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is as relevant as ever – as long as we use it. 

“No state has distanced itself from that treaty. So I see hope in that and I feel these are the tools that civil society has. You have the law, now push for implementation.”

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