The Nobel Peace Prize goes to Navi Pillay, the judge in major international trials

The 2026 Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to Navanethem “Navi” Pillay, an 85-year-old South African lawyer and former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. The Norwegian Committee honoured her “for her efforts to promote peace and international law”. The citation states that Pillay, “with exceptional courage and integrity”, has paved the way “towards a more comprehensive global legal order” and has been “instrumental in ensuring that war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide are prosecuted”.

Born in Durban in 1941 into a South African Tamil family, Pillay began practising as a lawyer during the apartheid era. In 1967, she became the first woman to open a law firm in the province of Natal and defended Nelson Mandela and other opponents of the regime. In 1995, she became the first non-white woman to sit on the South African High Court, before being elected as a judge at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.

It was there that he contributed to one of the turning points in international justice. In the Akayesu case, the panel of which she was a member ruled for the first time that rape could constitute an act of genocide. Pillay subsequently presided over the Rwandan tribunal from 1999 to 2003, moved to the International Criminal Court and, from 2008 to 2014, headed the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Since 2019, he has served as an ad hoc judge at the International Court of Justice in the proceedings brought by The Gambia against Myanmar concerning the treatment of the Rohingya minority. Until last year, he also chaired the UN Commission of Inquiry on the Palestinian territories and Israel. 

Among the names circulating in the run-up to the event was that of Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.