In awarding Navanethem ‘Navi’ Pillay the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize, the Norwegian Nobel Committee recognised a jurist whose long career qualifies her as one of the most deserving recipients in the Prize’s 125-year history.
Ms. Pillay was born in 1941 in a poor neighbourhood of Durban in a Tamil family. Her grandparents had been brought from India in the 1890s as indentured labourers for Natal province’s sugar plantations. Her father was a bus driver. After studying law at the University of Natal, she became the first woman to open a law practice in the province in 1967. She defended opponents of apartheid and fought for political prisoners.
In 1973, she won the inmates of Robben Island, who included Nelson Mandela, the right to legal representation. Later, she earned a doctorate in law from Harvard and campaigned for the equality clause in South Africa’s post-apartheid Constitution.
In 1995, she was nominated by President Mandela to serve on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. She spent eight years on the tribunal, four as president. It delivered two landmark rulings. One, rape and sexual violence could constitute genocide (the ‘Akayesu case’). Two, those who spread hate propaganda against the Tutsis by radio and print were guilty of incitement to genocide (the ‘Media case’). Following this stint, she served terms as a judge of the International Criminal Court (2003-08), as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (2008-14) and recently as the chair of the UN Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory from 2021 to 2025. She also sits as judge ad hoc, designated by The Gambia, in the International Court of Justice’s genocide case against Myanmar today.
A stark contrast
The decision by the Committee cannot be seen in isolation from what it did a year ago. In its statement lauding the work of Ms. Pillay, it said “peace requires justice,” and that international law “is no longer just a supplement to peace and security. It is an absolute necessity”. It warned of “a shift towards power politics at the expense of legal frameworks” and of a world where “might overtakes right” and of judges who are “sanctioned” while their institutions are “attacked”. It said that cases under international law have “produced different results depending on who is the perpetrator and who is the victim”.
Between the lines, it is clear whom the Committee is referring to. The U.S. under Donald Trump has sanctioned ICC officials since 2025 – and has reportedly expanded them on the same day the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Ms. Pillay. In January 2026, U.S. forces abducted Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro and took control over the country’s oil resources and revenues. On February 28, the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran, killing its Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. U.S. forces struck a primary school in Minab in southern Iran, killing more than 160 schoolgirls. The war that followed has led to a global fuel crisis and has still not ended.
Last year, the Committee honoured Venezuelan Opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, a staunch ally of the U.S. and Israel, and who backed the U.S. military pressure and actions on her country. In January, Ms. Machado farcically “gifted” her medal to Mr. Trump at the White House, embarrassing the Committee, which said the prize could not be transferred. The symbolism was clear though — the recipient of the award was handing it over to a man presiding over severe breaches of international law, which the Committee has now mentioned without naming Mr. Trump.
Justice over might
The choice of Ms. Pillay could help the Committee fend off some of the criticisms it faced in the past. In Plato’s Republic, Thrasymachus insisted that justice is nothing but the advantage of the stronger, which has now been turned into doctrine by great powers. The Committee’s statement is telling in this regard. It recalls that the “key insight” of the post-Second World War order was that lasting peace “must be built on legal principles, not on the will of the strong or a fragile balance of power”. In honouring Ms. Pillay, the Committee has in effect, rejected the Thrasymachian doctrine that has been adopted by leaders like Mr. Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and endorsed the conviction of jurists like her that law and not might must govern relations between nations.
In September 2025, Ms. Pillay was the chair of the UN commission of inquiry, which concluded that Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and found reasonable grounds that four of the five acts listed in the 1948 Genocide Convention had been committed since October 2023. Explaining the finding, she wrote in the New York Times: “The judicial panel over which I presided convicted three Rwandans of genocide. So I understand the word ‘genocide’, and it is not one I use lightly”. Citing words by then Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant and President Isaac Herzog, she said: “Their words have been matched by deeds… and a siege we concluded was designed to starve the population to death”. And that those deeds were “not the accidents of war. They are acts calculated to bring about the destruction of a people”. While saying so, she did not ignore the Hamas atrocities of October 7, which her Commission documented, adding: “But no crime, however grave, justifies genocide”.
Predictably, the reaction to the Prize from Mr. Trump and Israel has been in anger. Mr. Trump went on a rant on how he deserved the award and insulted Ms. Pillay while Israel called the award a “grotesque weaponisation” of the prize. The Committee’s chair, when asked about Ms. Pillay’s Commission terming Israel’s actions as genocide, said the “Nobel Committee is not the court”, but the Committee did send a message by honouring the jurist who named the crimes.
Threats to peace
World peace is threatened today in two directions. From the developed world, a superpower is using military superiority to nakedly grab resources while seeking to dismantle institutions meant to restrain such conduct. In the Global South, regimes such as the Myanmar junta have waged unremitting violence against the country’s citizens, including the expulsion of lakhs of Rohingya since 2017, with scarcely a world response. Both actions stem from a faith in power and in “might being right”, cocking a snook at an international order painstakingly built since 1945 but limited by the self-seeking actions of the great powers.
In such a milieu, it has fallen to jurists of international courts and investigators of human rights bodies to rise to the occasion to name illegal acts accurately and to sensitise the world to them, even if their findings are not binding or their judgments go unenforced. The Committee describes judges as “those who guard the thin red line between order and chaos” and in recognising Ms. Pillay, it has honoured their wider work. In doing so, it has also rightly offered a corrective against itself.
Published – October 11, 2026 01:00 am IST
