“Today we witness in real time how the promise of ‘never again’ is broken and tested in the eyes of the world,” said the Commission’s chair Judge Navi Pillay, who will receive the Sydney Peace Prize in November. “The ongoing genocide in Gaza is a moral outrage and a legal emergency.”

The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel, has determined Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide. 

At a press conference in Geneva, the Commission members Judge Pillay and Chris Sidoti said that their extensive investigation has led to the conclusion that Israeli authorities and security forces “committed four of the five genocidal acts defined by the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide”.

These acts are: killing, causing serious bodily or mental harm, deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of the Palestinians, and imposing measures intended to prevent births.

In an extraordinary moment of clarification, Chris Sidoti, noted that the fifth condition for genocide was not met – that is the transfer of children from one group to another. Rather, as the report noted, the genocidal intention of Israel has included the actual targeting of the children of Gaza as a way of ending any future for this community.

The Commission urged Israel and all countries to fulfil their obligations under international law “to end the genocide” and bring those responsible to account.

The Sydney Peace Foundation calls on the Australian Government to act on our international obligations: demand an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza, restore UN-led humanitarian access, stop arms transfers and enabling inputs (like jet fuel and parts), investigate and sanction complicity. Nothing less will suffice.

“This report provides the clarity we need to courageously live up to our obligations under international law and act to stop the genocide. A failure to stand up for peace with justice in Palestine will ultimately be failure to stand up for peace with justice everywhere,” said Melanie Morrison, Director of the Sydney Peace Foundation.

Judge Navi Pillay will be in Sydney on 6 November to accept the Sydney Peace Prize at the Sydney Town Hall where she will be joined by Chris Sidoti and other experts in international justice.

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The trophy’s design was inspired by raindrops, which start off small, but send ripples outwards which overlap with one another. This reflects the interconnectedness of our lives; no action is isolated, and even the smallest of ‘drops’ can be significant.

“The idea was layers and layers of different rings, connecting and overlapping,” Mr McGinness says. “[It represents] the effect one drop has on other people.” Like ripples, every step towards peace has the power to radiate outwards, impacting lives far beyond our own.

Movement is central to his art. “That’s what I love about steel. You can sort of suspend pieces in animation,” he says. In this work, it reminds us that peace is carried forward by action and motion, and that rather than being fixed, peace is always evolving and changing shape.

When he was commissioned to make the trophy, Mr McGinness wanted to create something unique: “I didn’t want to make just a stock piece,” he says. “I was actually very honoured to make this trophy. I think [peace] is probably the most important thing we have at the moment.”

With stainless steel as his medium, he invented his own formula for steel dye which he makes himself. The process of creating his work involves hours of designing, making sure the intricate pieces will stay together. He then puts his designs into a program to be read by a laser, which cuts them with precision.

“I think my wife put it best once. She said that I’m trying to combine tradition with technology,” he says.

He developed his expert steel-working skills through a 21-year career as a steel fabricator working in mine sites, towns, and remote communities. In 2008, he wondered whether he could put his steel-working skills to a different use. Taking inspiration from his parents, both of whom were painters, he began by creating works of Australian animals.

“I wanted to do something a little bit different, and came up with the idea of doing my own style of Aboriginal art in steel,” he says. “I couldn’t see anybody else doing that.”

More of Wayne McGinness’ work can be found on his company website, Aboriginal Steel Art.

By Molly Teskey, University of Sydney Intern

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By Emeritus Professor Stuart Rees

In response to the announcement made by Melanie Morrison, director of the Sydney Peace Foundation and by Clover Moore, Lord Mayor of Sydney, patron of the Foundation, Navi Pillay said: “I am deeply honoured to accept Australia’s premier international prize for peace. The award is not mine alone. It belongs to all those who, across decades and continents, have stood up against injustice, often at great personal cost. It belongs to every survivor who found the courage to testify, to every human rights defender who remains steadfast in the face of threats of hostility and to every young person who dares to believe in a better, more just world.”

Commentators on the choice of Navi Pillay convey why her Sydney Peace Prize Lecture in the Sydney Town Hall, on Thursday 6 November, will show a life of courageous striving for the ideals of a common humanity, achievements which should give hope to generations and should be an inspiration to young people.

Professor Ben Saul, UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms while Countering Terrorism, said, “Navi Pillay is an icon of the international human rights movement, from confronting apartheid and promoting gender equality in South Africa to serving on the highest national and international courts.’

Lord Mayor Clover Moore explains, ‘The Sydney Peace Foundation honours judge Pillay for her unwavering commitment to human dignity and her profound impact on international human rights law.’

Evidence of such judgments is easily found in Pillay’s career. Born into a Tamil family living under South African apartheid, she became the first non-white woman to open a law practice in Natal Province and the first non-white woman judge of the High Court of South Africa.

Attaining those positions required gutsy determination to overcome discrimination and prejudice. She recalls, “As a child in South Africa, I could not enter parks or beaches reserved for whites.

“When I became a lawyer, no-one would hire me because of my gender, the colour of my skin and my economic status. I was told that white secretaries would not like to take dictation from a black woman.”

Pillay came to global attention in her early 30s when she won a legal case for recognising the rights and better living conditions for South African dissidents jailed under apartheid’s Terrorism Act. In a subsequent Robben Island case, she challenged the Terrorism Act and, for the first time, provided concrete evidence that prisoners had been tortured.

The centrality of human rights

Pillay’s career and the achievements which impressed a Sydney jury revolve around a commitment to a philosophy, language and practice to promote universal human rights. She explains, “There can be no lasting development in a given society without respect for all human rights, economic, social and cultural as well as civil and political rights.”

Armed with that philosophy, she has campaigned against violence against women and the need to abolish harmful practices, female genital mutilation and forced child marriages. In her hopes about the future, she imagines, “The world needs coalitions to create a more values-led, ethical globalisation, and, in particular, in a century when women can make a difference.”

Promotion of human rights as the means of attaining human dignity echoes a theme expressed by Pillay’s illustrious predecessor, Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland, former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and recipient of the Sydney Peace Prize in 2002. In Sydney, 23 years ago, Robinson was rewarded for “courage in standing up for the powerless against the interests of powerful individuals and institutions”.

She reminisced that in Ireland, human rights abuses had precipitated the conflicts and in the eventual process of peace through reconciliation and bridge-building, restoration of human rights became both goal and potential panacea. The Northern Ireland Good Friday Agreement, signed on 10 April 1998, confirmed Robinson’s judgment.

Never shirking responsibility to adjudicate abuses of power

Exercising similar views and skills, from 1995-2003, Pillay became a judge and then president of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, created to adjudicate people charged with the Rwandan genocide and other human rights violations. Other positions with worldwide responsibilities included her appointment as a judge in the International Criminal Court and as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights 2008-2014.

An Australian audience in November will also be able to hear Pillay’s judgment about death and destruction in Gaza and on the West Bank. As chair of the UN Commission inquiring into war crimes in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Pillay has found that Israeli forces have committed gender-based violence with intent to humiliate and further subordinate the Palestinian community. UN experts have concluded that genocidal acts were evident in the destruction of maternity wards in Gaza, of reproductive health care facilities and embryos at a fertility clinic.

Chris Sidoti, the Australian lawyer colleague of Pillay’s on the Commission, concludes, “Sexual violence is now so widespread that it can only be considered systematic. It’s got beyond the level of random acts by rogue individuals.”

Pillay writes, “The evidence collected reveals a deplorable increase in sexual and gender-based violence to terrorise Palestinians and perpetrate a system of oppression that undermines their rights to self-determination.”

In this most recent, demanding judicial role, Pillay displays her life enhancing manner of exercising power, not from the top down but always with respect to evidence, to the needs and hopes of vulnerable usually powerless people.

She also has a reputation for kindness and warmth to all whom she encounters, whatever their status. Her courage in public life appears influenced largely by her legal knowledge and judicial skills, but to emphasise that dimension of her work would mean overlooking the tenets of humour, humility and a basic humanity, without which we are all lost.

That will no doubt be her message to Australians at an award dinner in Sydney on 5 November and at the Sydney Peace Prize Lecture. Both events could generate optimism, offering a sense of hope and each would show, in memorable ways, the style and content of visionary leadership.

This article was originally published in Pearls and Irritations on 5 June 2025.

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Greta Thunberg has excoriated world leaders for their “betrayal” of young people through their inertia over the climate crisis at a United Nations summit that failed to deliver ambitious new commitments to address dangerous global heating.

The post Greta Thunberg condemns world leaders in emotional speech at UN appeared first on Sydney Peace Foundation.

But for Mr Otunnu, a United Nations under-secretary-general, lawyer and 2005 Sydney Peace Prize winner, the city’s experience holds a lesson for all: children exposed to violence, radical indoctrination and hate provide the best recruiting pool for criminals and terrorists.

“Three of those who were involved in the London bombings were kids whose direct background was war,” Mr Otunnu said yesterday.

“The only way to guarantee long-term world peace is to invest in children. They can go either way … they can become the most important force in building peace or they become the most important spoilers of peace … indoctrinated, future raw material for terrorists.”

Mr Otunnu, a man of great eloquence and deliberation, has seen the very worst that human beings can wreak upon each other in war. As Kofi Annan’s special representative for children and armed conflict, he has travelled the world from the Balkans to his native Uganda, from Burma to Nepal and Sierra Leone, witnessing cruelty and bloodshed.

And yet it was from within atrocity that he found the greatest of human experiences:

“I saw a lot of horrendous things, everywhere I went without exception,” he told the Herald. “[But] it was those people whose faith, generosity, sacrifice, sheer courage in the midst of all this … as if out of the ugliness and general desolation imposed on them in war [who] held truly in them the core of the human spirit.”

Mr Otunnu’s travels produced an important report for the UN which identified 57 countries and groups involved in violence against children or their recruitment as soldiers.

In the years that followed, Mr Otunnu worked to build an internationally accepted system to identify and punish those who abuse children in war. In July his efforts reached fruition when the UN Security Council voted to adopt and implement all stages of the strategy, including escalating ultimatums culminating in economic, arms or trade sanctions.

Now, his strategic work with the UN is complete, the Makerere, Oxford University and Harvard Law School-trained lawyer, academic, former president of the UN Security Council and Ugandan foreign minister wants to establish a new international advocacy body for children. It will be known as the LBL foundation – L for the great Ugandan archbishop and martyr, Janani Luwumvery; B for Professor Okot p’Bitek, the renowned philosopher, poet and social anthropologist; and L for Dr Matthew Lukwiya, the doctor who lost his life treating Ebola virus victims.

Olara Otunnu will deliver the Sydney Peace Prize Lecture, Ending Wars against Children, tonight at the Seymour Theatre Centre.

By Paola Totaro. This article first appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald on November 10, 2005

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She had put the spotlight on both America and Australia for alleged human rights transgressions during her five controversial years in the job — along with Russia and China, and a string of third world offenders.

In Australia’s case, she annoyed the government by sending an envoy to investigate claims that they were in breach of the human rights convention by detaining the children of asylum seekers in Woomera.

Ironically, Mary Robinson is to be awarded the Sydney Peace Prize tomorrow night for “consistent support of the world’s vulnerable and disadvantaged”, and I spoke with her in Sydney earlier today.

KERRY O’BRIEN: Mary Robinson, you obviously had many frustrations as UN Human Rights Commissioner. But have you walked away with concrete definable achievements that made the job worthwhile?

The intellectual leadership on areas of economic and social rights, bringing a human rights analysis into poverty reduction strategies, the work of linking peacekeeping and having a human rights component in it, in our colleagues working in Sierra Leone, in East Timor, the work we were doing on transitional justice, as we called it — human rights commissions.

I sat in Peru during the summer at a meeting of the Human Rights Commission there. I was thanked as High Commissioner for the support we’d given, and then subsequently last August in East Timor I sat with a village community reconciling and again heard them say, “We couldn’t have done this “without the support of the Office of the High Commissioner.” So this is the sort of feedback you need to get, but it also showed me that committed targeted human rights work makes a huge difference.

KERRY O’BRIEN: And yet you mention East Timor — you must also have felt disappointed about East Timor because I can remember interviewing you when you were in Jakarta trying to lobby the then government to cooperate with a war crimes tribunal similar to that in Bosnia and Kosovo. Now that failed, didn’t it? It was left to the Indonesians in the end, and what’s happened?

It’s very interesting to see after two years, as I did last August, the impact on the population of East Timor because I could see a lot of building of houses with the roofing that had been provided by the High Commissioner for Refugees.

I could see more economic activity, people getting their lives back together, and yet I found in the whole population a seething anger about the ad hoc human rights court in Jakarta — the fact that the worst perpetrators looked as if they were going to get away with it.

And they kept saying to me, “We want an international tribunal.” And I was saying to them, “Well, now you have your own government “and you must ask your government to decide what East Timor wants,” and the government is reflecting on how to address the fact that they’re not getting justice in Jakarta.

KERRY O’BRIEN: You weren’t just engaged in conflict as commissioner with third-world countries, were you — very much also with first-world countries? You found yourself in conflict with the Australian Government over the detention centres for asylum seekers here. Do you deny the Government’s right here to detain people delivered into this country by people smugglers rather than through the UN’s own refugee programs?

What I was concerned about was the complaints that the manner of addressing with the preventive detention and the way in which it worked raised human rights issues.

And it was important precisely because Australia is a developed country and a democratic country that the international human rights standards apply and that they have to be sometimes addressed in a particular way.

So I was very glad to send Justice Bhagwati, the former chief justice of India, and I was very pleased with the report that Justice Bhagwati furnished. We had sent an advance to the Australian Government — they had it for a week before anybody else to correct any factual errors. They made some factual comments, and we incorporated them all. So it is factually correct and I believe that it is a very good human rights perspective on the issues that had to be addressed, and, as I say, stand over it 100 per cent.

KERRY O’BRIEN: Although the Australian Government was extremely critical of it publicly in the end, and they said that they felt Justice Bhagwati had come here with a preconceived view, that he listened really only to one side of the equation — that is, the partisan view of those who are lobbying against detention centres. And Justice Bhagwati himself acknowledged that he had very little time in fact to investigate properly.

You don’t think that you left the commission, that the way that was done that it left the commission exposed to those who accused it of running an agenda?

No, I don’t think so. I have the highest regard for Justice Bhagwati. As I said, he’s a former chief justice, he has an extremely high reputation in human rights and he’s precisely somebody who wouldn’t be swayed in an inappropriate way. He knew that he would have little time, that’s true. But he spoke to a very wide range of different groups, including at the government level. And the point now, I think, is that his report, together with the report of the working group on arbitrary detention, will be considered at the commission on human rights and by my successor, Sergio Vieira de Mello.

At a more philosophical level, it reinforced the integrity of international human rights and the agenda that, as High Commissioner, I would address issues in a country like Australia. I also spoke out about issues in the US and in other countries — France and elsewhere — as I addressed problems in developing countries.

KERRY O’BRIEN: You’ve been critical of the expression “war on terror”. Why?

I found it necessary immediately after the terrible attacks in the US on 11 September — and they were invoked again with the terrible attacks in Bali recently — I found it necessary to sit with my colleagues and carry out a human rights analysis and we concluded — and I said this very publicly shortly after the attacks — that they amounted to crimes against humanity, which requires legally that every country join in bringing the perpetrators to justice and using every appropriate means.

So I welcome the Security Council’s resolution 1373, requiring all countries in a mandatory obligation to take steps to follow the money, to do better police work, to tighten their laws, et cetera.

All of that, in my view, is a way to address the precise nature that there are terrible perpetrators — some of them al-Qa’ida, some of them groups in Indonesia that Australia is so rightly concerned about, and so on — and that we should focus in a surgical way on going after those perpetrators.

If you talk the language of “war on terrorism”, it’s a very blunt language, and there is a certain sense that, when you’re at war, you cut corners. And what I was worried about — and I saw it happening to some extent — was the corners being cut were precisely the standards of human rights.

If you are fighting a war in the name of freedom and democracy, then you must know that, at the heart of freedom and democracy, are your human rights standards.

KERRY O’BRIEN: And yet the US was responding to the most fundamental human rights abuse of all. The denial of life.

Indeed. Of course I’m completely unequivocal — terrorist acts like that are totally against human rights, and I made that clear from the beginning.

KERRY O’BRIEN: Why do you tilt at windmills?

I regard it in fact as incredibly encouraging to see that civil society groups worldwide are becoming more informed about the legal commitments our governments have made. This is very important for democracy. Young people have become very cynical about voting for a government and then seeing that it doesn’t reach its commitments. Here are new tools, a new way of enforcing.

It’s also very empowering of women’s groups, youth groups, black African descendant groups in the Americas, the Roma in Europe — they can use these tools. The most marginalised — the Aborigines here in Australia, rural communities that feel they’ve been left out can use these tools very effectively.

I think that governments are aware that this matters, and some are resisting for that reason. This actually penetrates into the power game and can make a more ethical globalisation.

KERRY O’BRIEN: Mary Robinson, thanks for talking with us.

Thank you.

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