In the Media

The Australian – 5 November 2025

This week, South African jurist and UN official Navi Pillay is set to receive the Sydney Peace Prize, “for a lifetime of advocating for fundamental human rights, peace with justice and the rights of women”.

Yet Pillay’s long record of weaponising international law to vilify Israel, promote antisemitic tropes and whitewash Hamas atrocities – including the systematic rape of Israeli women on October 7 – utterly belies the very purpose for which this award was created.

The award to Pillay will be presented by Lord Mayor Clover Moore, patron of the Sydney Peace Foundation, at a ceremony in Sydney Town Hall. Pillay will also meet with policymakers, journalists and civil-society leaders in Sydney and Canberra.

That the City of Sydney and the University of Sydney, both publicly funded institutions, are leading partners of this prize also raises serious concern about their judgement and the use of public funds to celebrate someone with such a questionable record of bias and distortion.

A former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and current chair of the UN Human Rights Council’s Commission of Inquiry on Israel and the Palestinian Territories, Pillay has falsely accused Israel of “genocide”, “apartheid” and “war crimes”, while systematically whitewashing and minimising Hamas atrocities and weaponising international law to delegitimise the world’s only Jewish state.

In 2009, as UN High Commissioner, Pillay even applauded Iran’s participation in a UN conference on racism led by Holocaust denier Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. She also tried to get Western sanctions against notorious human rights violator and dictator of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, lifted.

Far from being a voice for peace, Pillay has been one of the chief architects of the UN’s institutionalised campaign against Israel. The commission of inquiry she still heads up, established after the previous 2021 Hamas-Israel war, is one of the most extreme and prejudiced UN bodies ever created. It resembles an inquisition more than a commission: open-ended, unbounded, predetermined and directed solely at Israel. In fact, its mandate does not even refer to Hamas.

Her fellow commissioners include Miloon Kothari, who claimed the “Jewish lobby” controls social media, and Australian lawyer Chris Sidoti, who said Jews “throw around accusations of antisemitism like rice at a wedding”.

Pillay defended both. Together, they produced reports parroting Hamas propaganda and smearing Israel while excusing its attackers.

It is no coincidence that all three commissioners – Pillay, Kothari and Sidoti – announced their resignation in July amid mounting international condemnation and US sanctions against UN officials who had expressed support for terrorism and the baseless International Criminal Court warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant.

Western nations have long rejected Pillay’s commission. Indeed, the Albanese government has said “its broad and one-sided recommendations are further evidence of the mandate’s excessive and one-sided scope”.

The US, including under the previous administration of president Joe Biden, repeatedly admonished the commission, calling its approach “biased” and “a stain on the council’s credibility”.

Bipartisan legislation in congress even sought to eliminate it, saying it “directly obstructs peace in the Middle East” and that “US tax dollars have no place funding an anti-Israel commission”.

And yet, rather than being repudiated, Pillay is being honoured in Australia, with a public stage in Sydney Town Hall and meetings with senior officials.

Clover Moore, who will present the award, said “with an unwavering belief that the law must serve humanity, judge Navi Pillay’s work shows us that peace can be built through justice and dignity”.

But that description could not be further from reality. Pillay has not served humanity through law; she has manipulated the law to vilify Israel, whitewash Hamas, and erode the very notion of equal human rights she claims to defend.

Awarding Pillay this prize, not only legitimises her distortion of international law, but at a time of such surging antisemitism across Australia will only deepen division and embolden those who target the Jewish community and seek to sow discord.

By choosing to honour Pillay, the City of Sydney and Sydney University are sending a dangerous message: that antisemitism and double standards, cloaked in the language of human rights to vilify Israel, are acceptable, and indeed to be rewarded with public platforms and taxpayer funds.

Australia has long prided itself on fairness, integrity and moral courage. To honour Navi Pillay under the banner of “peace” is to betray those very values.

Arsen Ostrovsky is an Australian-Israeli human rights lawyer. He is the former chief executive of The International Legal Forum and incoming head of the Sydney office of the Australia & Israel Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC).