Navi Pillay wins 2026 Nobel Peace Prize: South African judge honoured for international law

South African judge Navanethem "Navi" Pillay has won the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize "for her efforts to promote peace and international law", the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced in Oslo on Friday 9 October, Reuters reported via Business Recorder.

Pillay, 85, is a South African of Indian Tamil origin, Al Jazeera reported. The prize is worth 12 million Swedish crowns, about $1.2 million (roughly Rs 33 crore at today's dollar rate), and will be presented in Oslo on 10 December, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel's death.

Who is Navi Pillay?

Pillay's career runs from South Africa's apartheid courts to the highest international benches:

• Anti-apartheid lawyer. She defended Nelson Mandela and others who opposed apartheid, the committee said, and it called that early work the common thread with everything that followed.
• International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. She served on the tribunal set up after the 1994 genocide.
• International Criminal Court. She also served at the ICC in The Hague.
• UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. She led the UN's human rights office in Geneva.
• International Court of Justice. She currently sits on the ICJ in the case in which Myanmar is accused of genocide, according to Al Jazeera.

Why the committee chose her

Committee chair Jorgen Watne Frydnes said the system of international law is "under tremendous pressure" and its institutions are "under attack", Al Jazeera reported. Judges, he said, "guard the thin red line between order and chaos." The choice comes in a year of war in the Gulf, with Houthi missiles hitting Saudi airports this week and flights from Pakistan cancelled as a result (our report).

Al Jazeera also reported that the committee chair said they had not yet been able to reach Pillay to tell her the news.

The 2026 Nobel week

The Peace Prize was the fifth Nobel of the week, after medicine, physics, chemistry and literature. The 2025 Peace Prize went to Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado.

For Pakistani readers, the prize has one familiar precedent: Malala Yousafzai shared the 2014 Peace Prize and remains the youngest Nobel laureate.