The Norwegian Nobel Committee has awarded the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize to Navi Pillay, an 85-year-old South African jurist, for her efforts to promote peace and international law. Announcing the prize in Oslo, committee chair Jørgen Watne Frydnes called her work "a source of hope and inspiration to all those who seek to bring about a more peaceful world" and said it sent a message to those seeking to undermine the international rules-based system and its institutions.
Pillay, born in Durban to a family of Indian descent under apartheid, became in 1967 the first woman to open a law practice in her home province of Natal. She defended anti-apartheid activists, exposed torture and helped establish rights for prisoners on Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela was held. She later served eight years at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, four of them as president, and presided over the 1998 Akayesu judgment, which found rape could constitute a crime against humanity and an act of genocide. Colleagues say that ruling placed survivors at the centre of international justice. She also served as a judge at the International Criminal Court (ICC), as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights from 2008, and now sits on the International Court of Justice (ICJ), where she is involved in the genocide case against Myanmar.
She was attending a forum in Nuremberg, Germany, the city of the post-war Nazi trials, when the news came; the committee had been unable to reach her. Responding with disbelief, she said that as a lawyer and judge she wanted to verify it. She dedicated the prize to survivors of international crimes and to defenders of international justice, and warned that political attacks risked a world in which "power rather than law determines whose suffering matters." Joking about last year's laureate, Venezuela's María Corina Machado, who handed her medal to Donald Trump, Pillay said she might "share this prize with Trump" if the applause continued.
The award is likely to be read as a rebuke to critics of international courts. Pillay chaired the UN commission of inquiry on the occupied Palestinian territory, which concluded last year that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza and that its president, prime minister and former defence minister had incited it. Israel, which refused to cooperate with the commission, has denied the charge. Its foreign ministry condemned the prize in sharply offensive terms, calling it a "weaponization" of the award and invoking Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. Pillay has rejected accusations of antisemitism, noting she worked closely with Jewish lawyers against apartheid.
Hours after the announcement, the Trump administration imposed broad new sanctions on the ICC as an institution, building on personal sanctions on officials last year. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the aim was to ensure the court never prosecutes Americans; the ICC has charged no US nationals. The court called the move an assault on the rule of law. Stephen Rapp, a former US war crimes ambassador who was with Pillay when she heard the news, said the court would survive.
In South Africa, President Cyril Ramaphosa praised her contribution to peace and human dignity, while human rights figures said she followed Albert Luthuli and Desmond Tutu, earlier South African laureates.