South African Judge Navi Pillay 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, whose career has taken her from defending opponents of apartheid in Durban to three international courts.

The news was real. On Friday, 9 October 2026, the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced in Oslo that the prize would go to Pillay “for her efforts to promote peace and international law.” She was chosen from more than 280 nominees. A few hours later, the United States government imposed sanctions on the International Criminal Court, where she had once been a judge.

The committee called her “one of the most courageous and important legal experts of our time,” and said the award came at a moment when “the system of international law is under tremendous pressure, and its institutions are under attack.”

Pillay was born on 23 September 1941 in Clairwood, in Durban, into a family of Indian Tamil descent. At the age of ten she wrote a school essay about how Black people received heavier sentences than white people in South African courts. She had no radio or newspapers, so she built her argument from what she had overheard from her parents and teachers. Donations from the local Indian community helped pay for her studies at the University of Natal, where most classes were segregated, and she earned a law degree there in 1965.

She trained under N.T. Naicker, a banned member of the African National Congress, who was often under house arrest and relied on the young Pillay to appear in court for his clients. In 1967 she became the first non-white woman to open her own law practice in the province of Natal. She has said she had no choice, because no law firm would employ her: they said white employees could not take instructions from a coloured person. As a non-white lawyer under apartheid, she was not even allowed to enter a judge’s office.

For 28 years she defended activists who fought against apartheid and helped expose the torture and poor conditions of political prisoners. In 1995 she became the first non-white woman to sit as a judge on the High Court of South Africa.

That same year, President Nelson Mandela put her forward for a seat on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, which was created to try those responsible for the 1994 genocide. She served there for eight years, four of them as president, and for the first four years she was the only woman among the judges.

In its early years the tribunal, based in Arusha, Tanzania, was known mainly for being slow and badly organised. Then, on 2 September 1998, it found Jean-Paul Akayesu, who had been mayor of the Taba commune during the genocide, guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity, including murder, rape and torture. It was the first conviction in a genocide case ever handed down by an international court.

Pillay was one of the judges. The case established that rape and sexual assault could be acts of genocide. Many Tutsi women had looked for shelter in Taba, and the court found that Akayesu had told a militia group to target and rape them. This opened the way to greater accountability for crimes committed mostly against women and girls. Pillay later explained what the ruling meant: “From time immemorial, rape has been regarded as spoils of war. Now it will be considered a war crime.”

Her work in Rwanda led to a place among the first judges of the new International Criminal Court. In 2008 she left to become United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. She held that post until 2014, the first woman from the global south to do so. Instead of deciding cases, she now had to persuade governments to keep their promises, through the Arab Spring and the civil war in Syria.

Her most recent work has been the most controversial. She chaired a UN commission of inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, which in September 2025 decided that Israel had committed genocide during the Gaza war. Israel has denied the accusation. Today she is a judge on the International Court of Justice, in the case in which Myanmar is accused of genocide.

In South Africa the prize was celebrated as a moment of national pride. Pillay is the fifth South African to win it, after Albert Luthuli, Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela and F. W. de Klerk, and the first South African woman. The committee also spoke of how unevenly international law is applied, and of how powerful states and leaders are able to escape responsibility.

By the end of the same day, the court she had helped to build faced the widest sanctions yet from the government of President Donald Trump. This time the measures could also punish companies that provide services to the court. “President Trump will never allow the International Criminal Court to prosecute Americans,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said. The court’s deputy prosecutor, Nazhat Shameem Khan, condemned the sanctions and said they would not stop the court’s work.