The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to South African judge and human rights lawyer Navi Pillay, at a time when the committee said international law faces “tremendous pressure” and its institutions are “under attack.”
Pillay, 85, has “held states and national leaders accountable and brought hope to victims of violence and conflict,” the Norwegian Nobel Committee said in a statement on Friday, calling her “one of the great defenders of international legal principles.”
Pillay is currently serving as a judge at the International Court of Justice, in The Hague, in the case in which Myanmar stands accused of genocide.
Last year, she chaired the UN Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, which investigated Israel’s retaliatory war in Gaza and concluded that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s administration had committed genocide against Palestinians, a finding that the Israeli government firmly denounced.
In what appeared to be a swipe at Netanyahu, and some other leaders around the world, including US President Donald Trump, Jørgen Watne Frydnes, chair of the committee, spoke of “a shift towards power politics at the expense of legal frameworks and global respect for law and justice.”
He told reporters in Oslo that the prize served as “a message that international law and its institutions are the cornerstone of a more peaceful world.”
The Israeli foreign ministry described the decision as a “grotesque weaponization of an award,” in a social media post.
Born into an Indian Tamil family in Durban, South Africa, Pillay founded her own law firm in 1967 and earned a doctorate from Harvard University in 1988.
She has served as a judge in South Africa, at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and was UN High Commissioner for Human Rights from 2008 to 2014.
Her work helped influence the definition of acts that can constitute genocide and crimes against humanity, including rape and sexual violence — and because of it a defendant in Rwanda faced charges of incitement to commit genocide purely on the basis of spreading propaganda.
“A common thread runs from her early work defending Nelson Mandela and others who stood up against apartheid to her service as a judge in some of the key international court cases of our time,” the committee said.
Arguably the most prestigious prize in global diplomacy, the Nobel Peace Prize can also stir controversy. Last year, Trump campaigned aggressively, and ultimately unsuccessfully, to obtain the award, which he has long coveted. Earlier this year, the 2025 laureate María Corina Machado gifted her medal to the US president, stunning Norway.
“If you clap a little bit more, I may share this prize with Trump,” Pillay joked after she received the news while attending the Nuremberg Forum, a gathering to discuss international law in the German town. “At this venue, your applause means a great deal to me, really. You don’t want to win an award, prize, or anything unless the public agrees that you deserve it.”
BREAKING NEWS
— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 9, 2026
The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided to award the 2026 #NobelPeacePrize to Navanethem “Navi” Pillay for her efforts to promote peace and international law. #NobelPrize pic.twitter.com/97vurspw6z
Hours later, the Trump administration announced more sanctions · against the International Criminal Court, which the White House has accused of unfairly targeting the US and Israel. The US Treasury Department had previously imposed penalties on top officials at the court, but on Friday it designated the entire body.
Ahead of the award, there were wild swings in betting on the Polymarket platform, with Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of late Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny emerging as the frontrunner overnight, trailed closely by Mykola Kuleba. His organization, Save Ukraine, says it has brought more than 165,000 people to safety from the frontlines since Russia took Crimea in 2014, and rescued more than 1,800 children and teenagers from Kremlin-controlled territory following President Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of 2022.
“She has spent her life making sure those who commit war crimes are held to account,” Kuleba said in a statement of Pillay. “That fight matters deeply to every Ukrainian family still waiting for justice.”
At the time of Friday’s announcement, the Norwegian Nobel Committee said it had not succeeded in reaching her.
“It was a total surprise,” Pillay said soon after in a televised press conference. “The director, Professor Christoph Safferling, called me out and then said, ‘Would you mind sitting down?’ I thought the worst. You know, something has happened to my children. I saw his serious face, but he had this happy news.”
She added, “these efforts that we are now seeing, which are attempts 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.”