In Durban, South Africa, in late August 2001, the country was seven years out of apartheid, and the United Nations had chosen it, for that very symbolism, to host the World Conference Against Racism. Instead, vendors sold The Protocols of the Elders of Zion at the venue. Fliers asked what the world would look like if Hitler had won.
Jewish delegates were jeered out of sessions, and the NGO Forum adopted a declaration branding Israel a racist, genocidal state. Tom Lantos, the only Holocaust survivor ever to serve in U.S. Congress, sat through it and called it “the most sickening and unabashed display of hate for Jews” he had witnessed since the Nazi period.
The secretary-general of that conference, who convened it, shaped its agenda and answered for its conduct, was Mary Robinson, then-U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights. A preparatory meeting in Tehran excluded Israelis and Baha’is while Robinson’s office declined to object. She opened the NGO Forum by declaring it an “integral part” of the conference.
When the delegation of U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell begged her to help strip the attacks on Israel from the governmental text, Lantos records that she argued the opposite, leaving the American delegation “deeply shocked and saddened.” The United States and Israel walked out. Lantos’s subsequent essay named her acts of omission and commission as a “major contributing factor to the debacle in Durban.”
Robinson’s defenders point to one moment: Shown a booklet of antisemitic cartoons, she told the room, “I am a Jew,” and later refused to transmit the NGO declaration. She saw the hatred at close range and then spent the next quarter-century defending the enterprise, describing the Durban outcome in 2009 as “remarkably good, including on the issues of the Middle East.” In 2008, she doubted that ordinary Israelis understood what was being done in their name. Last August, she stood at the Rafah crossing and pronounced an “unfolding genocide” in the Gaza Strip, a finding the International Court of Justice has never made.
On Aug. 28—some 25 years after Durban, almost to the week—a South African university placed a doctoral hood on the 82-year-old.
The apartheid government founded the University of the Western Cape in 1959 as a segregated college for people it classified as coloured. Its students and staff turned it into a weapon against the system that built it. By 1987, its rector had declared it the intellectual home of the left, and in 1990, days after Nelson Mandela walked out of prison, UWC became the first university in the world to give him an honorary doctorate. In South Africa, an honor from this institution carries the moral currency of the liberation struggle itself.
That is what made the Aug. 28 guest list so corrosive, and why it was chosen.
Robinson did not stand alone on that stage, and by the standards of the woman beside her, she was the moderate.
Francesca Albanese, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian territories, arrived at the United Nations with a paper trail. In July 2014, while fundraising for UNRWA, she wrote that America was “subjugated by the Jewish lobby” and Europe by Holocaust guilt. The same month, she told the BBC that “the Israeli lobby is clearly inside your veins.”
When the post surfaced in 2022, the U.S. special envoy to combat antisemitism, Deborah Lipstadt, condemned the pattern of blatant antisemitic rhetoric as unacceptable in the role, joined by the U.S. ambassadors to the United Nations and to the Human Rights Council. Albanese apologized for nothing and kept the mandate.
In April 2025, the U.N. Human Rights Council renewed it for three more years without addressing a single allegation. Her standard reply is that Jew-hatred has been weaponized against her. Nine governments, on this theory, all hold the weapon.
Then came Oct. 7.
When French President Emmanuel Macron called the massacre the largest antisemitic slaughter of the century, Albanese corrected him in public: The victims, she wrote, were “not killed because of their Judaism, but in response to Israel’s oppression.” For that sentence, France and Germany both formally condemned her, the first time either government has condemned a serving rapporteur for antisemitism. On International Women’s Day 2024, she addressed a message to Israeli women soldiers, some of whose sisters had been raped and burned five months after Oct. 7: “What have you done, what have you become.”
German legal scholars have documented her comparison of Israel to the Third Reich. UN Watch’s 60-page dossier on her conduct is titled Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing, and by 2026 her record had been formally denounced by the governments of France, Germany, Canada, the Netherlands, Hungary, Argentina, Estonia, Latvia and the Czech Republic.
The United States went further. In July 2025, Washington placed her under sanctions, an instrument normally reserved for terror financiers and war criminals, citing her campaign against American and Israeli officials at the International Criminal Court. She has worn the designation as martyrdom ever since, until two American Christian organizations sued her for defamation and she refused to be found. A process server first approached her mid-lecture in Johannesburg last October, at the Nelson Mandela Foundation’s annual lecture, in front of an audience that had come to hear her compare Israel to apartheid.
South Africa’s Justice Ministry apologized to her, to the United Nations and to the Foundation, for the indignity of due process. In May, a federal court in Colorado ruled that she had evaded service and allowed service by email, and days later, a U.S. appeals court reinstated her sanctions pending appeal.
Universities have responded by lining up to honor her: Three Flemish institutions gave her honorary doctorates this spring, prompting the historian Norman Goda to document, degree by degree, that certain credentials she has claimed for years, including a law degree she does not hold, were fabricated. The rectors’ joint defense conceded that they had not awarded it lightly. On Aug. 28, UWC handed this record its fourth doctorate.
The third honoree, Naledi Pandor, served as South Africa’s foreign minister when Pretoria filed its genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice in December 2023. She now chairs the Nelson Mandela Foundation and hosted the Johannesburg lecture at which Albanese was nearly served. Four weeks later, the United States revoked her visa by email and without explanation. A U.S. State Department official supplied one, explaining that she “has openly supported terrorism and endorsed violent jihads.”
A year ago, at a Cape Town mosque fundraiser, she explained that Muslims may engage in jihad “when necessary” and dated the start of the genocide to Oct. 8, 2023, as if the previous day had not happened. Washington has barred her from American soil. On Aug. 28, she was applauded.
Completing the slate was Adila Hassim SC, lead counsel in the ICJ case, honored, the university is at pains to note, for her broader career since the court has made no finding on the merits. The care in that caveat says the university knows which of its choices need cushioning. There was no dissenting voice anywhere in the room.
There is a pattern here, and it stretches across continents.
The honorary doctorate was meant to reward a lifetime of scholarship and service. It has become a circuit. Ghent, Antwerp and Brussels in the spring. The University of Pretoria made Pandor an honorary professor; Nelson Mandela University made her its chancellor; and on Aug. 28, UWC gathered the full set in one room. Each gown launders the record a little further: The sanctions become persecution; the fabricated degrees become pedantry; the Jewish lobby posts become youthful indiscretion; Durban becomes a footnote.
The institutions lend their seals, and the seals are the point: Such awards recognize politics and conscript the university’s name, and its struggle credentials, into it. That is why the recipients keep accepting degrees they don’t need from institutions they never mentioned—and why the institutions keep offering them.
So what does this tell the Jews of South Africa, a community of some 50,000 that hosted the world in Durban in 2001?
It tells them that a university’s highest ceremonial honor can go to the woman who presided over the ugliest outbreak of public antisemitism since the war and to a U.N. official who told the mourners of Oct. 7 that their dead were not killed for being Jews—and that neither fact was an obstacle.
It told them that the university that hooded Mandela before any other on earth has concluded that these records are what the liberation legacy now honors.
Charlotte Maxeke, awarded a posthumous doctorate on the same day, became the first black South African woman to earn a university degree, in 1901, against every barrier her country could erect. Hers was the only honor on the program that was earned, and she deserved better company. So do the rest of us.
