Nobel Peace Prize goes to Navi Pillay, the judge who helped make rape a crime of genocide
The South African jurist went from defending Mandela to the world’s top courts. The Nobel committee says the system she served is under attack.
Known
- The Norwegian Nobel Committee gave the 2026 Peace Prize to Navi Pillay on 9 October 2026 "for her efforts to promote peace and international law". - She has been a judge in South Africa, at the Rwanda tribunal and at the International Criminal Court, and was UN human rights chief from 2008 to 2014. - UN Secretary-General António Guterres congratulated her.
Not known yet
- What Pillay will say in her Nobel lecture in Oslo on 10 December. - How the ICJ case against Myanmar, where she sits as a judge, will end.
In 1967, a young lawyer in Durban opened her own practice, the first woman to do so in the South African province of Natal. Her clients included people fighting apartheid, among them Nelson Mandela.
On 9 October the Norwegian Nobel Committee gave that lawyer, Navanethem "Navi" Pillay, the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize "for her efforts to promote peace and international law".
From Durban to The Hague
Pillay was born in Durban in 1941 into a family of Indian Tamil origin, and grew up under apartheid. In 1995 she became the first black woman appointed as a judge to South Africa's High Court, according to the United Nations.
The same year she joined the UN tribunal set up to try those responsible for the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. She served there for eight years, four of them as its president.
She then sat as a judge at the International Criminal Court from 2003 to 2008, and was UN High Commissioner for Human Rights from 2008 to 2014. From 2021 to 2025 she chaired the UN commission of inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel. Today she is a judge at the International Court of Justice in the case in which Myanmar is accused of genocide.
Two rulings the committee singled out
The committee pointed to the Rwanda tribunal. In a 1998 judgment, the tribunal found that rape and sexual violence could be a crime against humanity and could be genocide. The committee said Pillay's influence was "a significant factor".
In the same case, it said, a defendant was charged for the first time with incitement to commit genocide purely on the basis of spreading propaganda.
"Institutions are under attack"
The committee used its announcement to make a wider point. It said the system of international law "is under tremendous pressure, and its institutions are under attack", and that judges are being sanctioned.
"Whenever might overtakes right, it undermines stability, trust and peaceful co-existence," the committee wrote.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres congratulated her. "She has shown that the force of law must prevail over the law of force," he said.
What comes next
The first Nobel Peace Prize was awarded 125 years ago. Pillay will receive this one in Oslo on 10 December.