Navi Pillay wins the Nobel peace prize
The 85-year-old judge, who defended Nelson Mandela and later led the UN's human rights office, is honoured for a lifetime spent building the international rule of law.
Navanethem “Navi” Pillay, a judge on the International Court of Justice, has won the 2026 Nobel peace prize. The Norwegian Nobel Committee announced the award in Oslo, recognising her efforts to promote peace and international law.
As The Guardian reported on 9 October, the committee’s chair, Jørgen Watne Frydnes, said Pillay, who is 85 and was born in South Africa, was honoured for that work. The committee described a common thread running 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 is one South Africans have a particular claim on. Before she was an international judge, Pillay was a Durban lawyer who took on the defence of anti-apartheid activists when doing so carried real personal risk. She later served as a judge of the High Court of South Africa, and went on to the International Criminal Court and then to the International Criminal Court’s appeals bench before her election to the ICJ in The Hague.
Between 2008 and 2014 she was United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, the body’s most senior human rights post. In that role she was the UN’s loudest voice on abuses from Sri Lanka to Syria, and she was frequently the official that governments in those conflicts most wanted to silence.
The committee framed the prize as a defence of the legal architecture itself. It said that at a time when the number of wars and conflicts is rising, and when judges and institutions of international law are under political attack, it wished to issue a reminder that the ability to resolve conflicts without force or violence depends on the international rule of law. An international legal system in which war criminals are held to account and victims of abuse see justice served is a precondition for a peaceful world, the committee said.
That framing lands differently in South Africa than almost anywhere else. This is a country whose own transition was negotiated rather than won outright, and whose constitution was written with the explicit intention of making law the mechanism for settling what politics could not. Pillay’s career runs through that tradition. She is also, with the ICJ, part of the court that South Africa has itself approached over the conflict in Gaza, a case that has put the country at the centre of arguments about how international law is applied and to whom.
The committee received 287 nominations for this year’s prize, just over a quarter of them for organisations. Nominations may be made by a select group that includes heads of state, national politicians, university professors, directors of foreign policy institutes, past laureates and members of the committee itself.
Last year the prize went to the Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, recognised for her struggle to achieve a democratic transition in that country.
Four other Nobel prizes were announced earlier this week. The medicine award went to three scientists whose work led to a tool that uses light to help unravel how the brain works. The physics prize recognised a scientist’s efforts to demystify a rare group of neutrinos, and the chemistry prize went to two scientists for untangling mirror images in molecules, a discovery used in the development of countless drugs.
For a South African reader the significance is straightforward. A lawyer who began her career defending people the state wanted jailed has ended it as a judge of the world’s principal court, and now holds the peace prize. It is a reminder, at a moment when the institutions of international law are under strain, that the country has produced one of the people holding them up.
Source: The Guardian, Navanethem ‘Navi’ Pillay wins Nobel peace prize
