South African judge Navi Pillay wins Nobel Peace Prize
Navi Pillay’s first thought, when she heard that she had won the Nobel Peace Prize, 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 the benches of 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 Navanethem “Navi” Pillay “for her efforts to promote peace and international law.” She was chosen from more than 280 nominees. A few hours later, the government of the United States imposed sanctions on the International Criminal Court, where she once served as a judge.
The committee described her as “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.” Its chair, Jørgen Watne Frydnes, said she had been “instrumental in ensuring that war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide are prosecuted”. Announcing the prize, he traced a line through 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 line begins in Clairwood, in Durban, where Pillay was born on 23 September 1941 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 could not get radios or newspapers, so she built the 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 she earned a Bachelor of Arts in 1963 and a law degree in 1965, on a campus where most classes and graduations were segregated.
She trained under Narainsamy Thumbi “N.T.” Naicker, a banned member of the African National Congress. Naicker was often under house arrest, and he 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 other choice: “No law firm would employ me because they said they could not have white employees taking instructions from a coloured person.” As a non-white lawyer under apartheid, she was not allowed to enter a judge’s chambers.
For 28 years she defended activists from the African National Congress, the Unity Movement, the Black Consciousness Movement and Azapo, and helped expose the torture and poor conditions of political prisoners. Later she studied at Harvard, earning 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, the first non-white woman to sit as a judge there.
That same year, President Nelson Mandela and his justice minister, Dullah Omar, put her forward for a seat on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, 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 on the bench.
The tribunal, based in Arusha, Tanzania, had a poor reputation in its early years. Algemeen Dagblad, a Dutch newspaper, reported at the time that it had become known mainly for being slow and badly organised: after four years, 31 suspects had been arrested, and only five were on trial. Then, on 2 September 1998, the court found Jean-Paul Akayesu guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity. Akayesu had been mayor of the Taba commune during the genocide. He was convicted on nine of the fifteen charges against him, including murder, rape and torture, and it was the first conviction in a genocide case ever handed down by an international court.
Pillay was one of the judges. The case set an international precedent: it established that rape and sexual assault could be acts of genocide. Many Tutsi women had sought shelter in Taba, and the court found that Akayesu had told a militia group to target and rape civilian women. It was also the first conviction of an individual for rape as a crime against humanity by such a tribunal, a step that opened the way to greater accountability for crimes committed disproportionately against women and girls. 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”.
Her work in Rwanda brought her to the attention of women’s rights advocates who were shaping the new International Criminal Court, and once the court was established she became one of its first judges. She was elected to its appeals chamber in 2003 and resigned in 2008 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 obligations, through the Arab Spring and the civil war in Syria.
Her most recent work has been the most contested. She chaired the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, a body that does not speak on behalf of the United Nations. In September 2025 the commission determined that Israel had committed genocide during the Gaza war. Israel has denied the accusation. Critics such as the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs have called some of her comments on the conflict antisemitic. Today she sits as a judge on the International Court of Justice, in the case in which Myanmar stands accused of genocide.
In South Africa the prize was greeted as a moment of national pride. Pillay is the fifth South African to win it, after Albert Luthuli in 1960, Desmond Tutu in 1984, and Nelson Mandela and F. W. de Klerk in 1993, and the first South African woman. Na’eem Jeenah, a senior researcher at the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection, called it “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 believe the prize would change conditions for Palestinians, but that it “adds to the body of moral and legal evidence against Israel”.
The committee, too, spoke of how unevenly international law is applied, and of the ability of powerful states and leaders to escape responsibility. The International Criminal Court’s president, Tomoko Akane, said that “at a time of profound challenges to the international legal order and the rule of law, this recognition carries particular significance”.
By the end of the same day, the court she had helped to build faced the widest sanctions yet from the administration of President Donald Trump. Washington had already sanctioned the court’s prosecutors and judges; this time the measures could also punish companies that provide services to the court itself. “President Trump will never allow the International Criminal Court to prosecute Americans,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement. The court’s deputy prosecutor, Nazhat Shameem Khan, condemned the sanctions and said they would not stop the tribunal’s work.