South African-born jurist Navi Pillay wins Nobel Peace Prize for her
work in international justice
[October 10, 2026]
By STEFANIE DAZIO, JAMEY KEATEN and KOSTYA MANENKOV
OSLO, Norway (AP) — Navi Pillay, a South African-born jurist and former
U.N. 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, won the Nobel Peace Prize on
Friday for efforts that the award committee said promoted 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 U.N. commission she led on Gaza. The
leaders also have been highly critical of the International Court of
Justice and the International Criminal Court. Pillay has worked at both.
Hours after the award was announced in Norway, the Trump administration
imposed sweeping new sanctions on the International Criminal Court as
part of its campaign to dismantle the tribunal over investigations into
the United States and its allies, including Israel.
Trump railed against the decision on Friday, claiming he deserved the
prize and dismissing Pillay as “a liberal person who works at the United
Nations who nobody has ever heard of.” He later said on social media
that “she, very obviously, hates Israel.”
“The Nobel Peace Prize has been forever discredited by a handful of
radical ideologues who are antidemocracy and really enemies of
civilization,” Trump told a rally for Republican candidates in Syracuse,
New York. “And we will not forget, Norway.”
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.
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. She was in the same room where the
trials were held when the prize was announced.
She said efforts to weaken international criminal justice “endanger the
progress painstakingly made since Nuremberg, and they risk returning us
to a world in which power, rather than law, determines whose suffering
matters.”
Winner led investigation that determined Israel committed genocide in
Gaza
Pillay chaired the Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian
Territory and Israel, which was created by the U.N.-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 Pillay’s first comments Friday after hearing she had won.
“What’s happening there is genocide,” she said to applause.
The commission also found that the Israeli president, prime minister and
former defense minister “have incited the commission of genocide.”
Israel, which has refused to cooperate with the commission since it was
established in 2021, has strenuously denied the accusations.
Pillay has repeatedly rebuffed critics who accused her of antisemitism
or 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 Oct.
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
U.N. rights chief from 2008 to 2014.
Growing up under the harsh system of segregation influenced Pillay's
interest in human rights and the law. Starting with Mandela’s
presidency, South Africa’s government has openly compared the situation
faced by nonwhite people during apartheid to the Palestinians’ plight.
“We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of
the Palestinians,” Mandela said soon after apartheid ended.
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South African-born jurist and former U.N. human rights chief
Navanethem "Navi" Pillay, sits at the Nuremberg Forum in Nuremberg,
Germany, Friday, Oct. 9, 2026, following the announcement that she
had been awarded the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize. (Daniel Karmann/dpa via
AP)
The Nobel announcement came at another critical time for Gaza, just
two days after the anniversary of the Hamas-led 2023 attack that
killed about 1,200 people and sparked the war. Over 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.
Netanyahu wrote on X that the Nobel committee “has lost its moral
compass” by awarding its highest honor to “a bigot who built her
career around inventing and propagating blood libels against the one
and only Jewish state.”
The award was announced less than three weeks before Israel’s
election, in which Netanyahu is fighting to stay in power.
Award and sanctions renew focus on Trump's feud with court
Pillay’s win and the new U.S. sanctions bring renewed attention to
Trump’s ongoing feud with the International Criminal Court, where
Pillay was a judge from 2003 to 2008.
In a video address, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the
administration would “ban transactions with this rogue court,
cutting off their resources and crippling its ability to operate
against us.”
The sanctions block any assets the ICC as an institution has in U.S.
jurisdictions and set a six-month timeline for American companies
and individuals to wind down any business with the court.
The Nobel committee did not immediately respond to an email seeking
comment following Rubio’s announcement.
Pillay currently serves 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 representative on the court’s
permanent, 15-judge panel, they can appoint an expert of their
choice. Gambia, which launched the proceedings in 2019, selected
Pillay when the country accused Myanmar of committing genocide
against the Rohingya minority group.
As a young lawyer in apartheid South Africa, part of Pillay’s work
involved establishing key rights for political prisoners being held
on Robben Island, which included Mandela, who later won the Nobel
Peace Prize.
After apartheid ended, Mandela appointed Pillay to be the country’s
first nonwhite woman to serve as a High Court judge.
Venezuelan opposition leader won last year
Last year, Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado won the
Nobel Peace Prize for her struggle to achieve a democratic
transition in the South American nation.
Machado gave Trump her Nobel medal shortly after the United States
ousted then-President Nicolás Maduro. But it was largely a symbolic
gesture: The Nobel Committee has said the honor itself cannot be
transferred.
In 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. After Pillay won Friday, Trump alleged without
evidence that the prize committee was “crooked,” saying it's “just
another sign of how Norway and all these others are ripping off our
country.”
The peace prize follows a week of Nobel announcements
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 Monday.
The prize money this year is 12 million Swedish kronor (about $1.2
million), whether for an individual, small group of laureates or
organization.
___
Dazio reported from Berlin, and Keaten reported from Geneva.
Associated Press journalists Gerald Imray in Cape Town, South
Africa; Ali Swenson in New York; Cara Anna in Jerusalem; Molly Quell
and Mike Corder in The Hague, Netherlands; Mark Lewis in Stavanger,
Norway; and Collin Binkley in Washington contributed to this report.
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