There is something both inspiring and deeply uncomfortable about celebrating an 85-year-old human rights champion while the world she spent a lifetime trying to civilise appears determined to return to the habits she fought against. We honour the veterans of international justice, applaud their courage, distribute medals and deliver speeches about humanity. Then we switch off the cameras and allow the machinery of injustice to continue operating with upgraded software, autonomous weapons and considerably more sophisticated excuses.
The problem is not that human rights have grown old. The problem is that the political systems responsible for defending them have failed to keep pace with the ingenuity of those determined to violate them.
Navanethem “Navi” Pillay represents a generation that understood, through direct experience, why international law matters. Her career, shaped by the struggle against apartheid and her work in international criminal justice and human rights, embodies the conviction that neither governments nor military commanders should possess unlimited authority over human lives. That conviction remains indispensable.
But admiration for the people who built the modern human rights system must not become an excuse for refusing to renovate it. The international framework that emerged after the Second World War was a response to industrialised slaughter, genocide, occupation and the catastrophic failure of governments to protect human dignity. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Geneva Conventions and subsequent treaties established principles intended to prevent the powerful from treating human beings as disposable material.
These were extraordinary achievements. They were never the final chapter. Today, the battlefield extends far beyond the trenches, cities and prison cells that shaped much of twentieth-century humanitarian law. Cyberattacks can disable hospitals, electricity networks and water supplies without a soldier crossing a border. Artificial intelligence can influence the selection of military targets. Automated surveillance can turn entire populations into searchable databases of suspicion. Digital platforms can facilitate persecution, expose vulnerable people to violence and manipulate information on a scale that earlier generations could scarcely imagine.
Meanwhile, civilians can be displaced not only by bombs but also by the destruction of digital financial systems, the collapse of essential infrastructure and automated decisions that deny people access to housing, employment or basic services.
The old legal principles remain relevant. Human dignity does not become obsolete because somebody has invented a faster computer. The distinction between combatants and civilians does not disappear because a targeting system uses algorithms. Nor does state responsibility evaporate when a government claims that an automated system made the decision.
Yet the application of these principles is becoming increasingly difficult. Who is accountable when an autonomous weapons system kills civilians? The commander who authorised its deployment, the government that purchased it, the company that designed it or the officials who approved its operational parameters? What happens when a cyberattack causes indirect deaths by disabling medical equipment? How should international law respond when algorithmic surveillance enables mass persecution but the evidence is distributed across private servers, encrypted systems and jurisdictions unwilling to cooperate?
These are not futuristic puzzles for academic conferences. They are practical questions of responsibility, evidence and justice. And the international community is moving far too slowly. Governments are enthusiastic about technological innovation when it offers military advantage, commercial profit or political control. They become considerably less enthusiastic when asked to accept binding limits on how that technology may be used. The same states that praise universal human rights can suddenly discover elaborate reasons why accountability should not apply to their own security operations.
This hypocrisy is not new. Technology merely gives it additional hiding places. The answer is not to throw away the post-war legal architecture. That would be an extraordinary gift to those who already regard international law as an inconvenience. Nor should every new technological development automatically trigger another treaty, another bureaucracy and another diplomatic circus.
What is needed is a serious programme of legal adaptation. International institutions must clarify accountability for AI-assisted and autonomous weapons, strengthen rules governing cyber operations against civilian infrastructure, establish enforceable protections against abusive digital surveillance and improve international cooperation in preserving evidence of violations. Governments should require meaningful human responsibility for consequential military decisions and ensure that victims have realistic avenues for investigation and remedy.
These safeguards must be developed with independent scientific expertise, civil society participation and the involvement of countries outside the traditional centres of geopolitical power. Otherwise, the digital rules of humanity will be written by the same powerful states and corporations that benefit most from leaving the present arrangements ambiguous.
Enforcement matters just as much as legislation. A beautifully worded treaty that powerful governments can ignore without consequence is merely an expensive monument to international embarrassment. And this is where the legacy of human rights champions such as Pillay should challenge us rather than comfort us. Their achievements were not valuable because they preserved institutions exactly as they found them. They mattered because they confronted systems that treated injustice as normal and demanded that those systems change.
The next generation must do the same. At 85, a human rights jurist can remind the world what courage, persistence and legal principle look like. But no individual, however distinguished, can compensate indefinitely for institutions that refuse to evolve.
We should celebrate the people who helped establish the foundations of international justice. We should also recognise that foundations are not houses, and historical victories are not permanent guarantees. Human rights do not have an expiry date. The methods used to defend them can become dangerously outdated. If international law cannot follow power into cyberspace, artificial intelligence and automated warfare, then the future will belong to those who understand technology better than they respect humanity.
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