Nobel Peace Prize goes to Navi Pillay, former UN human rights chief

Navi Pillay, a South African-born jurist and former United Nations human rights chief whose career has spanned from defending the rights of an imprisoned Nelson Mandela to leading a panel that found that Israel committed genocide in Gaza, won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for her efforts to promote international law as it comes under attack.

Her win is sure to be seen as a high-profile rebuke to U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who have both rejected the findings of the U.N. commission she led on Gaza. The leaders also have been highly critical of the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court; Pillay has worked at both.

Pillay’s work “is a source of hope and inspiration to all those who seek to bring about a more peaceful world,” said Jørgen Watne Frydnes, chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, in announcing her win in Oslo, Norway, as part of the peace prize’s 125th anniversary.

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The committee said it sought to strengthen international law at a time of conflict, and Watne Frydnes said Pillay’s award was a message to those seeking to undermine “the international rules-based system and the institutions.”

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In places such as Israel and in apartheid-era South Africa, she and peers took on some of the world’s most painful and sensitive legal issues and most vulnerable populations.

Pillay, 85, received the news while attending a forum in Nuremberg, Germany, where the trials of Nazi war criminals helped lay the foundations of international law. She was in the same room where the trials were held when prize was announced in Norway.

“Perhaps it was meant to be that I was in this historic Courtroom 600” of the Nuremberg Palace of Justice, she said.

She said efforts to weaken international criminal justice “endanger the progress painstakingly made since Nuremberg, and they risk returning us to a world in which power, rather than law, determines whose suffering matters.”

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World leaders, she added, have a “legal obligation to protect human rights and refrain from war.”

She chaired an investigation that determined Israel committed genocide in Gaza

Pillay chaired the Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel, which was created by the U.N.-backed Human Rights Council. The commission a year ago concluded Israel was responsible for genocide in Gaza with a specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza.

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Gaza was among Pillay’s first comments Friday after hearing she had won. “What’s happening there is genocide,” she said in Germany, to more applause.

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The commission last year also found that the Israeli president, prime minister and former defence minister “have incited the commission of genocide.” Israel, which has refused to cooperate with the commission since it was established in 2021, has strenuously denied the accusations.

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Pillay has repeatedly rebuffed critics who accused her of antisemitism or turning a blind eye to the Hamas attacks in Israel. Under her leadership, the commission also issued reports accusing Hamas of war crimes and violations of international humanitarian law during its Oct. 7, 2023, attack.

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 the U.N. rights chief from 2008 to 2014.

Growing up under the harsh system of segregation influenced Pillay’s interest in human rights and the law. Starting with Mandela’s presidency, South Africa’s government has openly compared the situation faced by nonwhite people during apartheid to the Palestinians’ plight.

“We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians,” Mandela said soon after apartheid ended.

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The Nobel announcement came at another critical time for Gaza, just two days after the anniversary of the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, that killed about 1,200 people and sparked the war.

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Over 74,000 Palestinians have since been killed, with their territory devastated. Saturday marks a year since a fragile ceasefire took effect, while Israeli strikes continue.

A senior Hamas official, Bassem Naim, in a statement Friday called the Nobel for Pillay a message of hope for Palestinians, especially in Gaza, that “humanity still resists the forces of evil targeting international justice.”

The Israeli Foreign Ministry, meanwhile, said in a statement that “if there were an award for lies, hatred, and blood libels, Navi Pillay wouldn’t just be a contender. She’d be a frontrunner.”

The ministry added on X that the award “isn’t a recognition of justice. It’s the grotesque weaponization of an award to legitimize anti-Israel hatred and prejudice.”

The award was announced less than three weeks before Israel’s election, in which Netanyahu is fighting to stay in power.

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Pillay’s win brings renewed attention to Trump’s ongoing feud with the International Criminal Court, where Pillay was a judge from 2003 to 2008.

The Trump administration already has sanctioned 13 of the ICC’s staff members, among them key prosecutors and nine judges, including the court’s Japanese President Tomoko Akane.

In his speech to the United Nations General Assembly last month, Trump called the court an “out of control institution” and an “anti-American tribunal with no jurisdiction” over the U.S. He urged member states to quit the court.

There are fears the court as a whole could be sanctioned, a move that could seriously hamper its ability to mete out justice.

Pillay currently serves as an ad hoc judge at the International Court of Justice, the highest court of the United Nations, in the ongoing genocide case against Myanmar.

When countries do not have a national on the court’s permanent, 15-judge panel, they can appoint an expert of their choice. Gambia, which launched the proceedings in 2019, selected Pillay when the country accused Myanmar of committing genocide against the Rohingya minority group.

As a young lawyer in apartheid South Africa, part of Pillay’s work involved establishing key rights for political prisoners being held on Robben Island, which included Mandela, who later won the Nobel Peace Prize.

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After apartheid ended, then-South African President Mandela appointed Pillay to be the country’s first non-white woman to serve as a High Court judge.

Last year, Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado won the Nobel Peace Prize for her struggle to achieve a democratic transition in the South American nation.

Machado gave Trump her Nobel medal shortly after the United States ousted then-president Nicolás Maduro. But it was largely a symbolic gesture: The Nobel Committee has said the honor itself cannot be transferred.

In Trump’s second term, he has been outspoken about his desire for the Nobel, but has expressed doubts that the committee would ever award him the prize.

“They have a reputation for maybe not giving it to people like me,” Trump told reporters Wednesday.

The peace prize follows a week of Nobel announcements.

Four of this year’s Nobels were announced earlier this week, in the categories of medicine, physics, chemistry and literature. The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences will be announced Monday.

The prize money this year is 12 million Swedish kronor (about $1.2 million), whether for an individual, small group of laureates or organization.