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The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded Friday to the South African legal pioneer Navanethem “Navi” Pillay for defending international law and institutions in a world in which increasingly “might overtakes right.”
Pillay, 85, has a decadeslong career that spans defending Nelson Mandela and standing up against the racist apartheid regime in South Africa, to leading a United Nations commission that concluded Israel committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.
“Navi Pillay is one of the great defenders of international legal principles in our time,” said Jørgen Watne Frydnes, chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee.
Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Navi Pillay
Frydnes contrasted Pillay’s work with the wider international “shift towards power politics,” in which “international law is under tremendous pressure, and its institutions are under attack.”
Her “distinguished career reminds us of the need to support, fortify and expand the global rule of law,” he said. “Navi Pillay’s commitment to justice and human dignity is a source of hope and inspiration to all who seek to bring about a more peaceful world.”
Pillay learned of her prize at the Nuremberg Forum, an international law gathering in Germany. She told an applauding crowd, “If you clap a little bit more, I may share this prize with Trump,” prompting laughter.
That was a reference to President Donald Trump’s long-standing ambitions to win the Nobel Peace Prize, and the offer by last year’s winner, Maria Corina Machado, to share it with him as she sought support for her efforts in Venezuela.
“Everybody asks me: ‘When are you going to stop? When are you going to stop?’” Pillay said, adding that despite turning 85 last month, she had no intention of doing so.
“The last thing I did was the report on Gaza, namely what’s happening there is genocide,” she said.
“One of the main reactions to that report was paying tribute to me for my courage,” she added. “But why would you need courage to speak the truth? You interpret the law and you look at all the facts.”
In later more formal remarks accepting the prize, she dedicated the award to “all of the survivors of international crimes,” warning against efforts “which attempt to weaken international criminal justice” which “risk returning us to a world in which power, rather than law, determines whose suffering matters.”
Among her many positions, Pillay previously served as a judge on the International Criminal Court, a frequent focus of ire for the Trump administration. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced fresh sanctions on the body on Friday, hours after the prize was announced.
“We will ban transactions with this rogue court, cutting off their resources and crippling its ability to operate,” Rubio said in a statement, threatening to continue a campaign “to dismantle the ICC, brick by brick.”
Agnès Callamard, secretary general of Amnesty International, was with Pillay in Germany and among the first people to congratulate her on the prize.
“This could not be a better choice at a time of attacks against international justice,” Callamard told NBC News. “She is a former ICC judge at a time when the U.S. administration is seeking to destroy the ICC,” she said, praising her work leading the U.N. commission “which found that Israel committed the crime of genocide at a time when many states are trying to defend and protect Israel’s actions.”
The ICC condemned the new U.S. sanctions Friday, and separately praised Pillay’s win as “an important recognition of the vital role that international justice plays as a cornerstone of lasting peace.”
Pillay was not among those speculated to be front-runners, who included Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of anti-Kremlin figure Alexei Navalny, Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate, and Mykola Kuleba, who founded an organization to rescue Ukrainian children abducted and forcibly taken to Russia.
The Norwegian Nobel Institute said it had has registered a total of 287 candidates for this year’s peace prize, with politicians, international judges and professors among those who can put names forward. The committee that decides the winner is composed of five members appointed by the Norwegian Parliament.
The leaders of Israel, Pakistan and Cambodia all said they nominated Trump for the prize, though he said this week he didn’t think he would win.
“I don’t know what their decision is going to be,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office Wednesday. “They have a reputation for maybe not giving it to people like me.”
Trump did not congratulate Pillay on Friday. Instead, on Truth Social, he reposted a message from another user that said the Nobel committee had “shamed itself beyond repair and demeaned the once great Nobel Peace Prize,” describing Pillay as “an unabashed hater of America and Israel.”
Alexander Smith is a senior reporter for NBC News Digital based in London.
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