THE AWARDING of the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize to South African jurist and former International Criminal Court (ICC) judge Navi Pillay for her lifelong efforts to promote peace, international law and human rights has been greeted with great praise. She welcomed the honor but said it was a “lonely” award, since promoting human rights and social justice was the collective work of many dedicated human rights workers and activists, as well as others equally committed to them. She did not see it as a personal award, but as a recognition of the international community of rights workers, of which she is a part.
Pillay was the first nonwhite woman to open a law practice in Natal, South Africa, in 1967. She spent decades defending anti-apartheid activists, political prisoners, and Robben Island detainees. One of them was Nelson Mandela, who became the country’s president a few years after he was released from prison. He appointed Pillay as the first nonwhite woman to join the South African High Court.
She later became a judge on — and president of — the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, where she helped establish landmark legal precedents, including recognizing rape and its incitement as instruments of genocide. She was also a judge on the International Court of Justice and served as the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights from 2008 to 2014. She led UN inquiries and commissions looking into human rights violations and conflicts, including leading a UN Human Rights Council commission that investigated the root causes of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Pillay was at a conference inside Courtroom 600 in Nuremberg, Germany, when she learned she won the Nobel Peace Prize. That courtroom was where Nazi war criminals were put on trial for committing genocide against the Jews. Keeping that in mind, it is now shocking that allegations of genocide have been made against Israel decades later. Many of the Jews who survived the Holocaust later migrated to Palestine and established the State of Israel there, displacing Palestinians and committing violence against them, as well as triggering a conflict that continues to this day.
In November 2024, the ICC pre-trial chamber issued arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense chief Yoav Gallant. Both face charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. They allegedly used starvation as a tool of warfare, murder, persecution and intentionally directing attacks against civilians. The warrants aim to bring them to trial and answer those allegations. The two are not charged with genocide, but the State of Israel is.
Netanyahu’s ally, United States President Donald Trump, was angry at the ICC over the warrants and imposed sanctions on several of its judges and prosecutors. He also fears possible investigations of his own illegal actions, like ordering the extrajudicial killings of suspected drug smugglers in Caribbean waters. He was enraged when the ICC opened an investigation into alleged human rights abuses in Afghanistan by US troops. (To be continued)/PN
