The Navi #Pillay story won’t stop growing. Now it’s Cuba.
In 2008, Cuba chaired the Non-Aligned Movement, a bloc of about 120 mostly developing countries, and Havana put her forward for the job of UN human rights chief. Then UN Watch looked at her first two years in that job and couldn’t find a single statement from her about how the Castro regime treats its own people.
It gets worse. In March 2010, the Cuban political prisoner Orlando Zapata Tamayo died after 85 days on a hunger strike, and governments everywhere were condemning Havana. That same month Pillay was photographed in Geneva, smiling next to Cuba’s foreign minister Bruno Rodríguez. Defending prisoners like Zapata was her job, and she spent that moment posing with the people who had locked him up.
In 2019, she went to Havana as head of an international commission against the death penalty, thanked the regime for its hospitality, and talked about how open it was to ending executions. In 2022, Cuba passed a new penal code that went in the opposite direction, raising the number of capital crimes from 20 to 24.
China, Cuba, Iran: each time she had to pick a side, she picked the regime over its victims. Israel, she never spared. And this is the woman Oslo has decided deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.
https://t.co/yC9Trmgwmx— Hanna Shen 沈漢娜🇵🇱🇹 (@haniashen) October 12, 2026
Navi Pillay’s record should raise far more than serious questions about the Nobel Committee’s judgment. It should disqualify her as a recipient of the peace prize.
🔴 When a car bomb struck Denmark’s embassy in Pakistan after Danish newspapers republished the Muhammad cartoons, former Danish foreign minister Per Stig Møller says Pillay’s advice was not to defend freedom of expression, but to introduce censorship.
🔴 Her response to Charlie Hebdo was no better. She called the magazine “doubly irresponsible” for publishing Muhammad cartoons, described them as “malicious and deliberately provocative,” and said she “fully understands why people wish to protest strongly.” In other words, when Islamists answer speech with threats and murder, Pillay’s instinct is to rebuke those exercising free speech rather than the extremists.
🔴 In 2022, Pillay defended fellow UN commissioner Miloon Kothari after he invoked the antisemitic trope of a “Jewish lobby” controlling social media and questioned Israel’s UN membership. Kothari later apologised. A planned event honouring Pillay at Berlin City Hall was cancelled after the mayor withdrew support.
🔴 In 2010, she declined to attend the Nobel ceremony for the imprisoned Chinese democracy campaigner Liu Xiaobo, citing a low-level scheduling conflict in Geneva, as Beijing pressured foreign officials to boycott the event.
🔴 At the antisemitic Durban II conference in 2009, Pillay remained seated while Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad delivered his tirade against Israel and Western delegations walked out. She condemned the speech afterwards—but later admitted that she had been “naive” about Ahmadinejad.
🔴 And a review of her first two years as UN human-rights chief found no public statements by Pillay on human rights abuses in dictatorships as Cuba, North Korea, Eritrea, Saudi Arabia, Sudan or Belarus.
This is the track record on which the Nobel Committee—and a chorus of commentators around the world—now celebrate this activist as a champion of human rights, freedom and peace. Despicable.
— Daniel Schatz (@drdanielschatz) October 11, 2026
This is Germany. White liberal women—often ugly and angry—are a huge problem. https://t.co/5hkkywXJd8
— RadioGenoa (@RadioGenoa) October 12, 2026