KEY TAKEAWAYS
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In awarding the honour to Navi Pillay, a former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and a leading figure in international criminal justice, the Nobel Committee places defending victims and the responsibility of states at the heart of building peace.
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The choice is particularly significant at a time when multilateral institutions are weakened and international crimes go largely unpunished.
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The decision can also be read as a repudiation inflicted on Donald Trump, who asserted (as he did the year before) that the prize should go to him.
On October 9, 2026, in Oslo, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded its Peace Prize to Navanethem “Navi” Pillay, an 85-year-old South African jurist, for her commitment to peace and international law. The committee chair, Jørgen Watne Frydnes, honoured a career dedicated to holding states and their leaders accountable for their actions, as well as giving hope to the victims of violence and conflict. The committee placed particular emphasis on the laureate’s contribution to the consolidation of an international legal order capable of prosecuting war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.
This distinction goes far beyond the consecration of an individual career. It poses a central question of political science: how to build peace when the military balance of power, national interests, and the calculations of great powers tend to prevail over common rules?
In honouring Navi Pillay, the committee recalls that peace is not reduced to a truce in fighting or deals struck between leaders. It also alludes to justice, the recognition of victims and the existence of mechanisms for punishing those responsible for crimes. In doing so the Nobel Committee highlights the principles of international law upheld by the UN, which did not miss the opportunity to promptly congratulate itself, taking credit for the prize that was awarded to one of its former officials.
A lawyer born under apartheid and figurehead of international justice
Born on September 23 1941, in Durban, to a South African family of Indian Tamil origin, Navi Pillay grew up under the apartheid regime institutionalised from 1948. Racial segregation dictated access to housing, education, employment and political representation. Despite coming from a community that was subject to multiple discriminations, she managed to study law and become a lawyer.
In 1967, she opened the first female-led law firm in Natal Province. Her duties included defending opponents of apartheid, in a context where political activists, resistance organisations and their supporters were exposed to repression. She was committed to both women’s rights to male-dominated legal professions and defending citizens’ rights against a racist and segregationist state.
South Africa’s transition to democracy, which began in the early 1990s and culminated in the multi-racial elections of 1994, opened up a new chapter. In 1995, Pillay was the first woman of colour to sit on the South African High Court. And in May 1995, she became a judge at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), created by the UN Security Council in November 1994, after the genocide against the Tutsi that killed about 800,000 people. Through the legal proceedings that she initiated, she contributed to making rape recognised as a war crime that is a potential weapon of mass destruction.
Pillay then chaired the ICTR from 1999 to 2003. She joined the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague in 2003, before being appointed UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in 2008. She held this position until 2014. In this role, she defended the universality of human rights, including cases when protecting these rights involved challenging powerful governments.
Such a career path adds particular coherence to the 2026 edition of the honour: from the struggle against apartheid to international courts, with this distinction, justice appears as a condition for lasting peace, in accordance with the principles of the UN.
The Nobel Prize in Paix: an independent procedure, not a popularity contest
Awarded since 1901, the Nobel Peace Prize sets out to follow a particular logic. In his will of 1895, Alfred Nobel entrusted the appointment of the laureate to a committee of five people chosen by the Norwegian Parliament, the Storting. This Norwegian Nobel Committee sits apart from the Swedish institutions who are in charge of the other Nobel prizes.
The selection process takes several months. Applications must be submitted by January 31st. Only certain categories of people are entitled to put forward nominees: parliamentarians and ministers, heads of state, academics who meet the criteria, former laureates or committee members, in particular. Self-nomination is not permitted. In 2026, the committee registered 287 candidates: 208 people and 79 organisations. The recent and commendable trend is indeed to award the prize to organisations rather than a single person, in order to value collective commitment. For instance, the prize was recently awarded in 2017 to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, in 2020 to the World Food Program (WFP) and in 2022 to two NGOs (one Ukrainian and one Russian), as well as the imprisoned head of a third Belarusian NGO.
After verification of their validity, the proposals are reviewed by the five committee members, who draw up a shortlist. Norwegian and international experts may be called upon to provide background information. Deliberations then continue until a final decision is reached, usually between late summer and early autumn. Consensus is sought, but a simple majority is sufficient. The names of candidates and documents relating to the proceedings remain confidential for 50 years.
Pillay and the report on the genocide in Gaza: a commitment with immediate geopolitical implications
The history of the Nobel Peace Prize shows that its choices are not exempt from controversy. When Henry Kissinger was awarded the prize in 1973, it provoked strong criticism. There were also polemics surrounding the choices of Barack Obama in 2009, the European Union in 2012, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abyi Ahmed in 2019 or Venezuelan Corina Machado last year, a far-right and ultraliberal opponent (who dedicated her prize to Donald Trump – a non-exhaustive list.
The appointment of Navi Pillay, too, will certainly make the most reactionaries cringe. Donald Trump, a long-standing enemy of the institutions of international justice, had made obtaining the Nobel Peace Prize a clear political goal, boasting again on October 7 2026, that he had “put an end to eight wars”. But by increasing the number of fundamental rights violations in the United States, while internationally defending a unilateral power policy that runs counter to international law, whether in relation to Venezuela or Iran, reason tells us that he could not claim the Nobel Peace Prize.
The awarding of this year’s prize has already triggered a strong reaction from Binyamin Netanyahu’s government.
From 2021 to November 2025, Navi Pillay admittedly chaired the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, which published a report in September 2025 (immediately rejected by Tel-Aviv, but also by Washington) concluding that genocide had been committed in Gaza, and holding some senior Israeli officials responsible.
In any case, the Nobel Prize awarded to the woman who was, for four years, president of this commission (now headed by the Indian jurist Srinivasan Muralidhar) gives additional visibility to the fact-finding work and the protection of civilians in Gaza. It aims to recall that international humanitarian law and the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide cannot be applied to variable geometry depending on the identity of the alleged perpetrators or their strategic alliances.
A signal to the great powers and multilateral institutions
The choice of Navi Pillay is part of a wider crisis in the international order. Her journey reminds us that international legal institutions, particularly those of the UN, are spaces where victims’ rights are recognised, facts are recorded and leaders may face obligations that go beyond their immediate interests.
It should also be noted that this award, the fourth for South Africa after Albert John Luthuli (1960), Desmond Tutu (1984) and the “duo” Nelson Mandela/Frederik De Klerk (1993), is the 21st prize awarded to a woman, out of 113 winners, which is less than one fifth.
By awarding this distinction to a jurist who devoted her life to the fight against apartheid, the prosecution of international crimes and defending of human rights, in a world where leaders, often authoritarian and unilateralist, willingly claim credit for agreements reached by force, the Nobel Committee recalls that peace is also measured by the collective ability of societies to enforce common and democratic rules, in accordance with international law – even though this concept and its interpretations remain sometimes controversial, as shown by some of the initial reactions to the announcement of the winner’s identity…
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