Navi Pillay, the South African-born jurist and former UN human rights commissioner whose career spanned from defending the rights of imprisoned Nelson Mandela to leading a commission that found Israel committed genocide in Gaza, won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for her efforts to uphold international law when under attack.
Her victory is sure to be seen as a major rebuke to US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who rejected the findings of the UN panel she led on Gaza. The leaders also strongly criticized the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court; Pillai worked in both.
Announcing her win in Oslo, Norway, as part of the 125th anniversary of the Peace Prize, Jorgen Watne Fredness, Chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Prize Committee, said that Pillay’s work “is a source of hope and inspiration for all those who seek to achieve a more peaceful world.”
The committee said it seeks to strengthen international law in times of conflict, and Watney Fredness said Pillay’s award was a message to those who seek to undermine “the international rules-based order and institutions.”
In places like Israel and apartheid-era South Africa, she and her peers dealt with some of the world’s most painful and sensitive legal cases and most vulnerable populations.
Pillay, 85, received the news while attending a forum in Nuremberg, Germany, where trials of Nazi war criminals helped lay the foundations of international law. She was in the same room where the trials were held when the award was announced in Norway.
“Maybe I was supposed to be in historic courtroom No. 600” at the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg, she said.
She said efforts to weaken international criminal justice “jeopardize the hard-won progress since Nuremberg, and risk returning us to a world where force, not law, determines whose suffering matters.”
She added that world leaders have a “legal obligation to protect human rights and refrain from war.”
She headed an investigation that found that Israel committed genocide in Gaza
Pillay chaired the Commission of Inquiry into the Occupied Palestinian Territories and Israel, established by the UN-backed Human Rights Council. The commission concluded a year ago that Israel was responsible for genocide in Gaza with the specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza.
Gaza was among Pillay’s first statements on Friday after learning of her victory. “What is happening there is genocide,” she said in Germany, to even greater applause.
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The commission also found last year that the Israeli president, prime minister and former defense minister “incited the commission of genocide.” Israel, which has refused to cooperate with the committee since its establishment in 2021, has strongly denied these accusations.
Pillay has repeatedly rejected critics who have accused her of anti-Semitism or turning a blind eye to Hamas attacks in Israel. Under its leadership, the committee also issued reports accusing Hamas of war crimes and violations of international humanitarian law during its attack on October 7, 2023.
In an interview with The Associated Press last year, she recalled how she worked closely with some Jewish lawyers in the fight against apartheid in her native South Africa, and was invited to Israel as UN human rights commissioner from 2008 to 2014.
Growing up under the harsh apartheid regime influenced Pillay’s interest in human rights and the law. Beginning with Mandela’s presidency, the South African government openly compared the situation faced by non-white people during apartheid to the plight of Palestinians.
“We know very well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians,” Mandela said shortly after the end of apartheid.
The Nobel Prize announcement came at another critical time for Gaza, just two days after the anniversary of the Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, which killed about 1,200 people and ignited the fuse of war.
Since then, more than 74,000 Palestinians have been killed and their lands destroyed. Saturday marks one year since the fragile ceasefire took effect, while Israeli strikes continue.
In a statement on Friday, Basem Naim, a senior Hamas official, described Pillay’s Nobel Prize as a message of hope to the Palestinians, especially in Gaza, that “humanity is still resisting the forces of evil targeting international justice.”
Meanwhile, the Israeli Foreign Ministry said in a statement that “if there was a prize for lies, hatred and blood slander, Navi Pillay would not just be a contender. She would be the favorite.”
The ministry added on the X website that the award “is not a recognition of justice. It serves as a hideous weapon of the award to legitimize hatred and bias against Israel.”
The award was announced less than three weeks before the Israeli elections, in which Netanyahu is fighting to remain in power.
Pillay’s win brings renewed attention to Trump’s ongoing dispute with the International Criminal Court, where Pillay was a judge from 2003 to 2008.
The Trump administration has already imposed sanctions on 13 ICC staff, including lead prosecutors and nine judges, including the court’s Japanese president, Tomoko Akane.
In his speech to the UN General Assembly last month, Trump described the court as an “out of control institution” and an “anti-American court with no jurisdiction” over the United States, and urged member states to withdraw from the court.
There are concerns that sanctions could be imposed on the court as a whole, a move that could seriously hamper its ability to deliver justice.
Pillay currently serves as a special judge at the International Court of Justice, the UN’s highest court, in the ongoing genocide case against Myanmar.
When countries do not have a national on the Permanent Court’s 15-judge panel, they can appoint an expert of their choice. Gambia, which initiated the proceedings in 2019, chose Pillay when the country accused Myanmar of committing genocide against the Rohingya minority.
As a young lawyer in apartheid South Africa, part of Pillay’s work was to establish basic rights for political prisoners detained on Robben Island, among them Mandela, who later won the Nobel Peace Prize.
After the end of apartheid, then-President of South Africa appointed Mandela Pillay to be the country’s first non-white woman to serve as a judge on the Supreme Court.
Last year, Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado won the Nobel Peace Prize for her struggle to achieve democratic transformation in the South American country.
Machado gave Trump the Nobel Medal shortly after the US ousted then-President Nicolas Maduro. But it was a largely symbolic gesture: the Nobel committee said the honor itself could not be transferred.
In Trump’s second term, he was vocal about his desire for a Nobel Prize, but expressed doubt that the committee would ever award him the prize.
“They’ve been known to maybe not give it to people like me,” Trump told reporters on Wednesday.
The Peace Prize comes a week after the Nobel Prize was announced.
Four of this year’s Nobel Prizes were announced earlier this week, in the categories of medicine, physics, chemistry and literature. The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences will be announced on Monday.
The prize value this year is 12 million Swedish krona (about 1.2 million dollars), whether for individuals or a small group of winners or organizations.
