Navi Pillay, a Judge from South Africa, Wins the Nobel Peace Prize

When Navi Pillay heard that she had won the Nobel Peace Prize, her first thought was that it must be a joke. “Being a lawyer and a judge, I still want to verify this,” said the 85-year-old South African. Her career has taken her from defending opponents of apartheid, the old system that kept Black and white people apart in South Africa, to three international courts.

The news was real. On Friday, 9 October 2026, the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced in Oslo that Pillay had won the prize “for her efforts to promote peace and international law.” She was chosen from more than 280 people. The committee said that the prize came at a time when the system of international law was under great pressure.

Pillay was born on 23 September 1941 in Clairwood, in the city of Durban, into a family of Indian Tamil background. When she was ten, she wrote a school essay about how Black people got heavier punishments than white people in South African courts. She had no radio or newspapers, so she used what she heard from her parents and teachers. Money from the local Indian community helped her to study at the University of Natal, where most classes were separated by race. She finished a law degree in 1965.

She learned her job from a lawyer who was often kept at home by the police, so the young Pillay went to court for his clients. In 1967 she became the first non-white woman to open her own law office in Natal. She said she had no choice, because no law firm would give her a job. For 28 years she defended activists who fought against apartheid, and she helped to show how political prisoners were tortured. In 1995 she became the first non-white woman to work as a judge at the High Court of South Africa.

In the same year, President Nelson Mandela put her forward for a new court for Rwanda. This court was created to judge the people responsible for the genocide of 1994, the killing of a large part of a people. She worked there for eight years. At first the court was known for being slow and badly organised. Then, on 2 September 1998, it found Jean-Paul Akayesu guilty of genocide. Akayesu had been a mayor during the genocide, and it was the first time an international court had found someone guilty of genocide.

Pillay was one of the judges. The case showed for the first time that rape could be an act of genocide. In an interview, Pillay said that for a very long time people had seen rape as a normal part of war, but now it would be treated as a war crime.

Later she became a judge at the new International Criminal Court. In 2008 she left to become the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, a job she did until 2014.

Her most recent work has caused the most argument. She led a UN group that studied the Palestinian territories, and in September 2025 this group decided that Israel had committed genocide in the Gaza war. Israel says this is not true. Today she is a judge at the International Court of Justice, in the case against Myanmar.

In South Africa, people were proud. Pillay is the fifth South African to win the prize, after Albert Luthuli, Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela and F. W. de Klerk, and she is the first South African woman to win it.

But a few hours after the news, the United States government put sanctions, or official punishments, on the International Criminal Court, where Pillay once worked as a judge. These were the widest sanctions so far, and they could also punish companies that work for the court. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that President Trump would never allow the court to put Americans on trial. The court’s deputy prosecutor, Nazhat Shameem Khan, said the sanctions would not stop the court’s work.