Former ICC judge Navi Pillay wins 2026 Nobel Peace Prize
Baku, October 9, AZERTAC
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", according to Reuters.
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."
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".
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