OSLO/NUREMBERG, Germany, Oct 9 (Reuters) – Navi Pillay, a former ICC judge who oversaw a UN report that concluded Israel committed genocide in Gaza, won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday “for her efforts to promote peace and international law”.
Announcing the award hours before the US imposed sanctions on the International Criminal Court, the Nobel Committee said in its citation that recognising Pillay underlined the importance of maintaining an organised international order.
The 85-year-old South African has been a judge on several international courts, including the ICC and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.
The Hague-based ICC has long been a target of US President Donald Trump, whose campaign against it has escalated since the court announced arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister.
Trump last month urged countries to leave the ICC and had already imposed targeted sanctions on several prosecutors and judges at the court. On Friday the US went further and imposed sanctions on the court itself.
“The system of international law is under tremendous pressure, and its institutions are under attack,” the Nobel committee said in its citation, which made no reference to Trump, nor Israel.
“We see a shift towards power politics at the expense of legal frameworks and global respect for law and justice. Whenever might overtakes right, it undermines stability, trust and peaceful co-existence.”
Pillay was also chair of the UN Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory that concluded last year that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza. Israel dismissed the report at the time as “scandalous”.
Netanyahu’s office condemned the award in a statement on X.
“The Nobel Prize committee has lost its moral compass,” it said. “It has awarded its highest honour to a bigot who built her career around inventing and propagating blood libels against the one and only Jewish state.”
IN NUREMBERG AT TIME OF ANNOUNCEMENT
Pillay received news of the prize while she was attending a legal conference in the building in Nuremberg, Germany, where the first international criminal tribunal was set up in 1945-1946 to judge the crimes of the Nazis, 80 years and nine days after the verdicts in those trials were delivered.
“The last thing I did is the delivery of the report on Gaza, naming what’s happening there as genocide,” Pillay told a crowd gathering to celebrate the award, a video posted on social media by the head of rights group Amnesty International showed.
“If you clap a little bit more, I may share this prize with Trump,” she added, to laughter, in an apparent reference to the decision by last year’s laureate, Maria Corina Machado, to give her Nobel medal to the US president in January to help gain support for her campaign for a democratic Venezuela.
Trump has repeatedly said he deserved to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
Pillay later dedicated the award to “all the survivors of international crimes as well as to practitioners and defenders of international justice whose compassion and courage continue to ensure that impunity will not be allowed to reign”.
Turning her attention to world leaders, she told them: “You are under legal obligation … to protect human rights and refrain from war”.
‘INSTITUTIONS ARE UNDER ATTACK’
The award body wanted the world to remember that the rule of law underpinned the international system set up to ensure peace and that this system was under “tremendous pressure”, its chair said.
“Of course, the most powerful states have particular responsibility, but we see it all over the world, unfortunately,” Joergen Watne Frydnes told Reuters.
“The institutions are under attack. Many judges are being sanctioned.”
The award was welcomed by ICC President Tomoko Akane.
“At a time of profound challenges to the international legal order and the rule of law, this recognition carries particular significance,” she said in a statement.
Haakon Gjerloew, acting director of the Peace Research Institute Oslo, said the Nobel Committee was not directly criticising Trump by rewarding Pillay.
“I think it’s generally rather a promotion of an international legal world order. Of course, he might react to someone who has been part of the ICC, but it’s not a direct attack on Trump,” Gjerloew said.
‘FIRM MORAL COMPASS’
Born in Durban, in South Africa’s Natal province, into a family of Indian Tamil origin, Pillay served as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights from 2008 to 2014.
In 1967 she became the first woman to start a law practice in Natal and, after the end of apartheid, the first non-white woman to serve on South Africa’s High Court.
She was the fifth South African national to win the Nobel Peace Prize, after Nelson Mandela and FW de Klerk, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Albert Luthuli.
Pillay held states and national leaders accountable and demonstrated a firm moral compass in her long career, said the committee.
“A common thread runs from her early work defending Nelson Mandela and others who stood up against apartheid to her service as a judge in some of the key international court cases of our time,” said the citation.
Pillay continues to work as a judge, currently serving on the International Court of Justice in the case where Myanmar stands accused of genocide, the citation said.
The peace prize is the fifth Nobel awarded this week, after literature, chemistry, physics and medicine. Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado won in 2025.
The Nobel Peace Prize, worth 12 million Swedish crowns, or about $1.2 million, is due to be presented in Oslo on December 10, the anniversary of the death of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, who founded the awards, opens new tab in his 1895 will.
