Nobel Peace Prize awarded to ex-UN human rights chief Navi Pillay

Navi Pillay, a South African-born jurist and former UN human rights chief whose career has spanned from defending the rights of an imprisoned Nelson Mandela to leading a panel that found that Israel committed genocide in Gaza, has won the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts to promote international law as it comes under attack.

Her win is sure to be seen as a high-profile rebuke to US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who have both rejected the findings of the UN commission she led on Gaza.

The leaders have also been highly critical of the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court; Ms Pillay has worked at both.

Ms Pillay’s work “is a source of hope and inspiration to all those who seek to bring about a more peaceful world”, said Jorgen Watne Frydnes, chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, in announcing her win in Oslo, Norway, as part of the peace prize’s 125th anniversary.

The Norwegian committee said it sought to strengthen international law at a time of conflict, and Mr Watne Frydnes said Ms Pillay’s award was a message to those seeking to undermine “the international rules-based system and the institutions”.

While her career has been global in scope, criticism has often been fiercely local, notably in places such as Israel and in apartheid-era South Africa as she and peers took on some of the world’s most painful and sensitive legal issues and most vulnerable populations.

Ms Pillay received the news while attending a forum in Nuremberg, Germany, the location of the trials of Nazi war criminals that helped lay the foundations of international law.

“Firstly, at this venue, your applause means a great deal to me,” the 85-year-old said to a standing ovation.

“You know, you don’t want to receive an award, prize or anything unless the public agrees that you deserve this.”

She later told a news conference that leaders have a “legal obligation to protect human rights and refrain from war”.

Ms Pillay chaired the Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel, which was created by the UN-backed Human Rights Council.

The commission a year ago concluded Israel was responsible for genocide in Gaza with a specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza.

Gaza was among Ms Pillay’s first comments on Friday after hearing she had won.

“What’s happening there is genocide,” she said in Germany, to more applause.

The commission last year also found that the Israeli president, prime minister and former defence minister “have incited the commission of genocide”.

Israel, which has refused to co-operate with the commission since it was established in 2021, has strenuously denied the accusations.

Ms Pillay has repeatedly rebuffed critics who accused her of antisemitism or allegedly turning a blind eye to the Hamas attacks in Israel.

Under her leadership, the commission also issued reports accusing Hamas of war crimes and violations of international humanitarian law during its October 7 2023 attack.

In an interview with The Associated Press last year, she recalled how she worked closely with some Jewish lawyers in the fight against apartheid in her native South Africa and was invited to Israel as the UN rights chief from 2008 to 2014.

The Nobel announcement came at another critical time for Gaza, just two days after the anniversary of the Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7 2023 that killed about 1,200 people and sparked the war.

More than 74,000 Palestinians have since been killed, with their territory devastated.

Saturday marks a year since a fragile ceasefire took effect, while Israeli strikes continue.

A senior Hamas official, Bassem Naim, in a statement on Friday called the Nobel for Ms Pillay a message of hope for Palestinians, especially in Gaza, that “humanity still resists the forces of evil targeting international justice”.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry, meanwhile, said in a statement that “if there were an award for lies, hatred, and blood libels, Navi Pillay wouldn’t just be a contender. She’d be a frontrunner”.

It added on X that the award “isn’t a recognition of justice. It’s the grotesque weaponization of an award to legitimize anti-Israel hatred and prejudice”.

The award was also announced less than three weeks before Israel’s election, in which Mr Netanyahu is fighting to stay in power.

For Israelis, however, the issue is less about the government’s approach to Gaza and more about how well it would protect them from further attacks.

Ms Pillay’s win brings renewed attention to Mr Trump’s ongoing feud with the International Criminal Court (ICC), where Ms Pillay was a judge from 2003 to 2008.

The Trump administration has already sanctioned 13 of the ICC’s staff members, among them key prosecutors and nine judges, including the court’s Japanese president Tomoko Akane.

In his speech to the United Nations General Assembly last month, Mr Trump called the court an “out of control institution” and an “anti-American tribunal with no jurisdiction” over the US as he urged member states to quit the “rogue institution immediately”.

There are fears the court as a whole could be sanctioned, a move that could seriously hamper its ability to mete out justice.

Ms Pillay is currently serving as an ad hoc judge at the International Court of Justice, the highest court of the United Nations, in the ongoing genocide case against Myanmar.

When countries do not have a national on the court’s permanent 15-judge panel, they can appoint an expert of their choice.

Gambia, which launched the proceedings in 2019, selected Ms Pillay when the country accused Myanmar of committing genocide against the Rohingya minority group.

As a young lawyer in apartheid South Africa, part of Ms Pillay’s work involved establishing key rights for political prisoners being held on Robben Island, which included Mr Mandela, who later won the Nobel Peace Prize.

After apartheid ended, then-South African president Mr Mandela appointed Ms Pillay to be the country’s first non-white woman to serve as a High Court judge.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee in Oslo received nominations for 287 candidates for this year’s prize, with just over a quarter of them organisations.

Last year, Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado won the Nobel Peace Prize for her struggle to achieve a democratic transition in the South American nation.

Ms Machado gave Mr Trump her Nobel medal shortly after the United States ousted then-president Nicolas Maduro.

But it was largely a symbolic gesture: the Nobel Committee has said the honour itself cannot be transferred.

In Mr Trump’s second term, he has been outspoken about his desire for the Nobel, but has expressed doubts that the committee would ever award him the prize.

“They have a reputation for maybe not giving it to people like me,” Mr Trump told reporters on Wednesday.

Nominations can be made by a select group of people and organisations, including heads of state or politicians serving at a national level, university professors, directors of foreign policy institutes, past Nobel Prize recipients and members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee itself.

Four of this year’s Nobels were announced earlier this week, in the categories of medicine, physics, chemistry and literature.

The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences will be announced on Monday.

The prize money this year is 12 million Swedish kronor (£900,000), whether for an individual, small group of laureates or organisation.