South African judge Navi Pillay, a former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, has won the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize. The Norwegian Nobel Committee announced the award on 9 October 2026 for her efforts to promote peace and international law.
The committee praised Pillay’s decades of work against genocide and war crimes, which it said were marked by “judicial rigour, personal integrity and considerable courage”. It called her one of “the great defenders of international legal principles in our time”, according to Al Jazeera. She is the fifth South African to win the prize.
Navanethem Pillay was born Navanethem Naidoo on 23 September 1941 in Durban, in what was then the Union of South Africa. She is of Indian Tamil origin: her grandparents came from India as indentured servants to work on sugar plantations in Natal in the 1890s. She studied at the University of Natal, earning a BA in 1963 and a law degree in 1965, and in 1967 she started her own law firm, the first woman in Natal province to do so. During apartheid she was part of the legal defence of those who opposed it.
Her family history is part of the story. Her parents were Narrainsamy and Santhama Naidoo, and her grandfather lost both arms in an accident at the sugar mill where he worked.
She went on to study at Harvard, earning a Master of Laws in 1981 and a Doctorate of Juridical Science in 1988. In 1995 she was confirmed to the High Court of South Africa, the first non-white woman judge on that court. The same year President Nelson Mandela and Justice Minister Dullah Omar nominated her for a judgeship at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. She served there between 1999 and 2003, when she was elected president judge, and from 2003 to 2008 she was a judge of the International Criminal Court, where she sat on the Appeals Chamber.
In 2008 the UN General Assembly approved her appointment, by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, a post she held until 2014. Since 2019 she has served as an ad hoc judge on the International Court of Justice in the Rohingya genocide case, The Gambia v. Myanmar. She also chaired the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, which concluded in 2025 that Israel was responsible for genocide in Gaza, according to Al Jazeera.
Pillay, 85, reacted with humour and a message. She joked that she might “share this prize with Trump”, and dedicated the award to “all of the survivors of international crimes”, adding that “we must stand together in defence of the rule of law.”
The award was announced three days before the economics prize and in a year of intense argument over international law, from the war in Ukraine to the fighting in Gaza and Yemen. The committee’s choice puts a spotlight on international courts and tribunals. Delima News notes that the age given for Pillay varies between sources, with Al Jazeera saying she was born in 1940 and Wikipedia giving 23 September 1941; we have used the latter.
Image: Navi Pillay speaking at a 2018 event (file photo, not from the events described). Photo: Wayamo Foundation / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)
