Navi Pillay, a South African-born jurist and former UN human rights chief whose career has spanned from defending the rights of an imprisoned Nelson Mandela to leading a panel that found that Israel committed genocide in Gaza, won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for efforts that the award committee said promoted international law as it comes under attack.
Her win is sure to be seen as a high-profile rebuke to U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who have both rejected the findings of the U.N. commission she led on Gaza. The leaders also have been highly critical of the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court. Pillay has worked at both.
Hours after the award was announced in Norway, the Trump administration imposed sweeping new sanctions on the International Criminal Court as part of its campaign to dismantle the tribunal over investigations into the United States and its allies, including Israel.
On the 125th anniversary of the prize’s inception, the Norwegian Nobel Committee sought “to remind the world that the rule of law, national and international, underpins the system we have set up to ensure peace and resolve conflicts nonviolently. Peace requires justice,” committee Chairman Jørgen Watne Frydnes said.
Judges “guard the thin red line between order and chaos,” and the world needs jurists “of courage, vision and determination, qualities that Navi Pillay demonstrates in her work on the bench.”
In places such as Israel and in apartheid-era South Africa, she and peers took on some of the world’s most painful and sensitive legal issues and most vulnerable populations.
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