The Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to Navi Pillay, a South African human rights lawyer and jurist, in an endorsement of the importance of international law as it comes under “tremendous pressure”.
The Nobel committee said on Friday that Pillay, 85, who has served on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the International Criminal Court, was a “lawyer and legal pioneer”.
It added the 2026 award came as “the system of international law is under tremendous pressure, and its institutions are under attack”.
The prize is likely to be seen as a shot across the bows of many autocrats and even democratically elected leaders such as US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Trump has issued sanctions against the International Criminal Court, which has issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu as well as Russia’s President Vladimir Putin over his country’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Last year, Pillay chaired a UN commission that determined that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza, an accusation Israel has vehemently denied.
The Nobel Peace Prize is awarded to Navi Pillay on Friday
The Nobel committee said that from her early work as a lawyer, including defending Nelson Mandela, Pillay has become “one of the most respected international jurists of our time”.
“Her distinguished career reminds us of the need to support, fortify and expand the global rule of law,” it added.
Pillay was born in 1941 in Durban, South Africa, to a family of Indian Tamil origin. Her father was a bus driver, while her mother was denied education under apartheid.
“I was treated like dirt just because of my skin colour,” she told South Africa’s The Citizen newspaper in 2023, recalling how even her later legal qualifications could not shield her from discrimination. “But we learned not to succumb to that.”
Navi opened her own legal practice in 1967 because no white law firm in South Africa would hire a woman of Indian descent, and went on to defend anti-apartheid activists on Robben Island.
But it was her subsequent work in Rwanda that would reshape international criminal law. As president of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, Pillay co-authored a groundbreaking 1998 judgment that established that mass rape and sexual violence constitute acts of genocide under international law.
The Nobel committee said Pillay’s work confronted “deep structural discrimination, segregation and exclusion”.
It said that in “historic” international court cases, Pillay has shown that “legal measures can help prevent acts of war and violence” and contributed to strengthening the institutions of international law.
The award signalled the Nobel committee’s intent to underscore the importance of the rule of law in an increasingly volatile geopolitical environment.
“The institutions that uphold the international law are under tremendous pressure, sanctions and attack,” said Jørgen Watne Frydnes, chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee.
“In the world we are living in, with more conflicts [than] in a long time, supporting, strengthening and also expanding the work of these institutions are key to a more peaceful world,” he added.