Navi Pillay, a judge from South Africa, wins the Nobel Peace Prize

When Navi Pillay heard that she had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, her first thought was that someone was playing a joke on her. Pillay is 85 years old and comes from South Africa. Her career began in Durban, where she defended people who opposed apartheid, and it later took her to the benches of three international courts. Her reaction showed that legal training: “Being a lawyer and a judge, I still want to verify this,” she said.

But the news was true. The Norwegian Nobel Committee made the announcement in Oslo on Friday, 9 October 2026. It said the prize would go to Navanethem “Navi” Pillay “for her efforts to promote peace and international law.” More than 280 candidates had been nominated. Only a few hours after the announcement, the United States government placed sanctions on the International Criminal Court, where she had once worked as a judge.

The committee called her “one of the most courageous and important legal experts of our time.” It explained that the prize came at a time when “the system of international law is under tremendous pressure, and its institutions are under attack.” Its chair, Jørgen Watne Frydnes, said she had been “instrumental in ensuring that war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide are prosecuted”. When he announced the prize, he connected the different stages of her working life: “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”.

That thread starts in Clairwood, a part of Durban. Pillay was born there on 23 September 1941, into a family with Indian Tamil roots. When she was ten, she wrote an essay for school arguing that South African courts gave Black people harsher sentences than white people. She had no access to radios or newspapers, so she based her argument on things she had heard her parents and teachers say. Money given by the local Indian community helped to pay for her studies at the University of Natal. She received a Bachelor of Arts there in 1963 and a law degree in 1965. On that campus, most classes and graduation ceremonies were separated by race.

She learned her profession under Narainsamy Thumbi “N.T.” Naicker, a member of the African National Congress who had been banned by the authorities. Naicker was frequently kept under house arrest, so he depended on the young Pillay to represent his clients in court. In 1967 she became the first non-white woman to set up her own law practice in the province of Natal. She has said that she had no alternative: “No law firm would employ me because they said they could not have white employees taking instructions from a coloured person.” Under apartheid, as a non-white lawyer, she was not even allowed to go into a judge’s chambers, the private office where a judge works.

Over 28 years she represented activists from the African National Congress, the Unity Movement, the Black Consciousness Movement and Azapo. She also helped to reveal that political prisoners were being tortured and held in poor conditions. Later she went to study at Harvard, where she gained a master’s degree in law in 1981 and a doctorate in 1988. In 1995 she was appointed to the High Court of South Africa, becoming the first non-white woman to serve as a judge on that court.

In the same year, President Nelson Mandela and his justice minister, Dullah Omar, nominated her for a seat on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. The tribunal had been set up to put on trial the people responsible for the genocide of 1994. She spent eight years there and was its president for four of them. During her first four years, she was the only woman among the judges.

The tribunal was based in Arusha, Tanzania, and in its early years it was not well regarded. At the time, the Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad reported that it was known mainly for being slow and poorly organised. After four years of work, 31 suspects had been arrested, but only five of them were on trial. That changed on 2 September 1998, when the court found Jean-Paul Akayesu guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity. During the genocide, Akayesu had been the mayor of the Taba commune. Of the fifteen charges against him, he was found guilty on nine, among them murder, rape and torture. No international court had ever before convicted anyone in a genocide case.

Pillay was one of the judges who decided the case. Their ruling set an international precedent, an example for other courts to follow, because it established that rape and sexual assault could count as acts of genocide. Many Tutsi women had gone to Taba looking for safety, and the court found that Akayesu had told a militia group to target civilian women and rape them. It was also the first time a tribunal of this kind had convicted an individual of rape as a crime against humanity. This step made it easier to hold people responsible for crimes that are committed against women and girls far more often than against others. In an interview, Pillay explained what the ruling meant: “From time immemorial, rape has been regarded as spoils of war. Now it will be considered a war crime. We want to send out a strong signal that rape is no longer a trophy of war”.

Because of her work in Rwanda, she came to the notice of campaigners for women’s rights who were helping to design the new International Criminal Court. When the court was set up, she became one of its first judges. She was elected to its appeals chamber in 2003, and in 2008 she resigned to become United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. She stayed in that role until 2014, and she was the first woman from the global south to hold it. Her job was no longer to decide cases. Instead, she had to persuade governments to respect their obligations, during the Arab Spring and the civil war in Syria.

Her most recent work has caused the most controversy. She led the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, a body that does not speak for the United Nations. In September 2025 the commission concluded that Israel had committed genocide during the war in Gaza. Israel rejects this accusation. Some critics, among them the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, have described some of her comments about the conflict as antisemitic. She now serves as a judge at the International Court of Justice, in the case in which Myanmar is accused of genocide.

In South Africa, people welcomed the prize as a reason for national pride. Pillay is the fifth South African to win it, and the first South African woman. The earlier winners were Albert Luthuli in 1960, Desmond Tutu in 1984, and Nelson Mandela and F. W. de Klerk in 1993. Na’eem Jeenah, a senior researcher at the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection, described it as “an honour not only for South Africa but for the whole of Africa, a continent that is battling with its own conflicts and violations of international law.” He said he did not think the prize would improve conditions for Palestinians. However, he believed that it “adds to the body of moral and legal evidence against Israel”.

The committee also spoke about how international law is not applied equally to everyone, and about how powerful states and leaders are able to avoid being held responsible. Tomoko Akane, the president of the International Criminal Court, said that “at a time of profound challenges to the international legal order and the rule of law, this recognition carries particular significance”.

Before the day was over, the court that Pillay had helped to build was hit by the broadest sanctions so far from the administration of President Donald Trump. Washington had already sanctioned the court’s prosecutors and judges. The new measures went further, because they could also punish companies that provide services to the court as an institution. In a statement, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said: “President Trump will never allow the International Criminal Court to prosecute Americans.” Nazhat Shameem Khan, the court’s deputy prosecutor, condemned the sanctions and said they would not stop the tribunal from doing its work.