“From Cuba to cartoons: Pillay has sided with dictatorships and against freedom”. Neuer speaks out

“Navi Pillay showed courage in the work she did in South Africa during the apartheid era,” Hillel Neuer, director of UN Watch – the long-standing NGO that has been a thorn in the side of the United Nations – tells Il Foglio. “But if you look at her career since she joined the UN in 2008 as High Commissioner for Human Rights, you can see that she has always gone with the flow and aligned herself with the dominant regimes.” Take Cuba, for example. In July 2008, the Castro regime supported Pillay’s nomination to the UN as a representative of the Non-Aligned Movement. 

Two years later, whilst the death in prison of political prisoner Orlando Zapata Tamayo following an 85-day hunger strike was drawing international condemnation, Pillay was seen smiling in Geneva alongside the Cuban Foreign Minister, Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla. Pillay never commented on Zapata, but she later visited Havana as chair of the International Commission Against the Death Penalty and thanked the regime for its hospitality.

Pillay could have spoken out but did not even comment on the Cuban dissident Oswaldo Payá (awarded the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought by the European Parliament) when Rosa María Payá asked her for an independent investigation into her father’s death. “In her dealings with Cuba, Pillay was backed by the Non-Aligned Movement, within which Pakistan and China wield considerable influence,” Hillel Neuer continues in Il Foglio. “And she went along with them. There is a certain culture at the UN: attacking the West, attacking capitalism and attacking Israel. It is the dominant culture and there is an automatic majority. And she fell into line. If you look at her track record, it is very poor on Iran. She has never been courageous on Tehran. That is well documented. On Cuba, she has been largely silent.”

And on the subject of China, she was complicit. “We know that Foreign Policy is a very pro-UN magazine and published an important article on how Pillay snubbed the Nobel Prize award ceremony for Liu Xiaobo. Liu was a courageous man; he was imprisoned in China and was one of the most important figures in the Chinese democracy movement. When he was awarded the Nobel Prize, Pillay refused to go to Oslo, coming up with a trivial bureaucratic excuse and claiming she had a scheduling conflict. This outraged Liu Xiaobo’s representative, Dr Yang Jianli, himself a former political prisoner.”

And this was no isolated incident. “There was an established culture of collaboration with China within her office,” says Neuer. “And China is very powerful. Being complicit with China is not an act of courage. Emma Reilly, the whistleblower, revealed that her office regularly passed on the names of dissidents who were due to speak a month or two later at a UN session. China wanted to know who was coming. And Pillay’s office passed on the information. Reilly repeatedly said: ‘You can’t do that, it’s very dangerous; you’re putting them and their families at risk, including many Uyghurs’, at a time when China was persecuting and oppressing the Uyghurs. We know they have detained a million people in camps. And Pillay allowed it.”

But it is not just dissent in dictatorships. In an interview with the Danish daily Berlingske, Denmark’s former Foreign Minister, Per Stig Moller, has just recounted another incident involving Pillay, saying he was “furious and shocked” when he learnt she had been awarded the Nobel Prize. When Denmark faced attacks in the Islamic world over the Muhammad cartoons (a car bomb exploded outside the Danish embassy in Islamabad), Copenhagen turned to the UN, specifically to the then High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay.

On that occasion, Pillay refused to support Denmark. Her suggestion to the Foreign Secretary was to introduce censorship. “They spoke only of defamation of religion, of defamation of Islam, and they created a new concept,” says Neuer. “A concept that is a sort of counter-narrative to counter reports on terrorist attacks – 9/11, the Bataclan, 7 July in England – and all these Islamist terrorist attacks in Europe and many other countries. The Islamic countries at the UN came up with the idea. They said: ‘Islam is the victim’.”

They have introduced a new concept: ‘Islam has rights’. Yet only individuals possess rights. A competing notion has emerged: ‘Religion has rights; one cannot defame a religion’. This proposition is fundamentally at odds with the concept of individual rights. This narrative has proven so influential that even the name of a room at the Human Rights Council in Geneva has been subverted. Meetings are held in the Human Rights and Alliance of Civilisations Chamber.

A concept, devised by Turkey and Spain, according to which the West and Islam were meant to come together. Thus, the chamber that should be primarily concerned with individual rights has incorporated the Alliance of Civilisations into its remit. When the Danish embassy was attacked and Charlie Hebdo was attacked – this was before the 2015 massacre – Pillay said it was provocative. She condemned Charlie Hebdo. Her reaction was not to defend freedom of expression, saying that we have the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and that freedom of expression is a fundamental right. That was not her response. Her response was to attack Charlie Hebdo. That is not courage. They gave her the award for accusing Israel of genocide.”

In general, Neuer concludes, Pillay is emblematic of a culture of rights usurped by dictatorships. “There was a time when Western countries took a stand. Around 2010, Westerners were still saying openly: no, we will not accept this. And they fought back. But in recent decades, generally speaking, the West has been unable to defend itself. We can see that. That is why I recently remarked that, if you look at Israel, you see that Bahrain, Morocco and the United Arab Emirates are increasingly closer allies of Israel than countries such as the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia.”

This is because these Muslim countries are fighting Islamists; they know what Islamism is and are fighting it. Our Western societies have changed completely. One could argue that our societies have been subverted from within, and we are no longer able to defend what the West stands for. I believe Pillay is a symbol of this downfall, of this decline.’ Perhaps she did not win the Nobel Peace Prize; perhaps she won it for having turned the law into a one-way weapon—in the direction of the regimes.