International jurist Navi Pillay wins Nobel peace prize

10 OCTOBER 2026

Navi Pillay, a South African-born jurist and former UN human rights chief, 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 U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who have both rejected the findings of the UN commission she led on Gaza.

Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel

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.
The commission last year also found that the Israeli President, Prime Minister and former Defence Minister “have incited the commission of genocide.”
The commission also issued reports accusing Hamas of war crimes and violations of international humanitarian law during its October 7, 2023, attack.

Role of Judges

On the 125th anniversary of the prize’s inception, the Norwegian Nobel Committee sought “to remind the world that the rule of law, national and international, underpins the system we have set up to ensure peace and resolve conflicts nonviolently. Peace requires justice,” committee Chairman Jørgen Watne Frydnes said.
Judges “guard the thin red line between order and chaos,” and the world needs jurists “of courage, vision and determination, qualities that Navi Pillay demonstrates in her work on the bench”.
In places such as Israel and in apartheid-era South Africa, she and peers took on some of the world’s most painful and sensitive legal issues and most vulnerable populations.
Ms. Pillay, 85, received the news while attending a forum in Nuremberg, Germany, where the trials of Nazi war criminals helped lay the foundations of international law.