South African judge Navi Pillay, 85, wins the Nobel Peace Prize
Navi Pillay, a judge from Durban who defended Nelson Mandela and later ran the UN’s human rights office, won the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday. She was in the Nuremberg courtroom when she heard, and thought it was a joke.
13 October 2026
Photo: Getty Images, via RTÉ
The Norwegian Nobel Committee gave the 2026 Peace Prize on Friday to Navanethem “Navi” Pillay, “for her efforts to promote peace and international law.” She is 85 and still sitting as a judge.
She was in Nuremberg when the news came, in the courtroom where the Nazi leaders were tried after the Second World War.
They called me out now to tell me, and I said, ‘It must be a joke.’ Being a lawyer and a judge, I still want to verify this.Navi Pillay
The room kept clapping. “If you clap a little bit more,” she said, “I may share this prize with Trump.” Donald Trump had said earlier in the week that it would be a “great discredit” to the committee if he did not get it.
Pillay was born in Durban in 1941, under apartheid, to a family of Indian Tamil origin. In 1967 she became the first woman to open a law practice in what was then Natal. She defended Nelson Mandela and other people on trial for fighting apartheid. In 1995 she was the first woman of colour appointed to South Africa’s High Court.
After that she was a judge, then president, of the international tribunal for Rwanda, where her court ruled that rape can be an act of genocide. She sat on the International Criminal Court, ran the UN’s human rights office from 2008 to 2014, and is now a judge at the International Court of Justice in the case in which Myanmar is accused of genocide.
The committee said international law is “under tremendous pressure” and that judges like her “guard the thin red line between order and chaos.”
Pillay said she was dedicating the prize “to all of the survivors of international crimes.”
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