Former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navanethem “Navi” Pillay has been awarded the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize for her lifelong work promoting peace and upholding international law, the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced.
The 85-year-old jurist shared that her immediate reaction to the news was disbelief, thinking it must be a joke. “Being a lawyer and a judge, I still want to verify this,” she stated.
A native of Durban, South Africa, Pillay has dedicated decades to international law and human rights advocacy. During the late 1990s and early 2000s, she served as a judge and later presided over the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, which investigated and prosecuted those responsible for the 1994 genocide.
In recent years, she has served on the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, established by the UN Human Rights Council in 2021.
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