10/10/2026
Navi Pillay -- an 85-year-old South African jurist who has spent more than half a century using the law to hold the powerful to account -- was awarded the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize today. In announcing the award, the Norwegian Nobel Committee made a pointed assertion about the current moment. "In awarding this year's Nobel Peace Prize, the Norwegian Nobel Committee wants 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 non-violently," it wrote. "Peace requires justice." At a time when judges are being sanctioned and the courts built to check the powerful are under attack, the committee said, the world needs people of "courage, vision and determination." It had chosen a woman who has embodied all three, against long odds, for her entire life.
Navanethem Pillay was born in 1941 in Durban, South Africa, the daughter of a bus driver, into an Indian Tamil family living under the brutality of apartheid. The community she came from was granted few rights and fewer opportunities, and the idea that one of its daughters might one day sit in judgment of heads of state would have seemed absurd. She became a lawyer anyway -- and in 1967, when few women and almost no women of color practiced law in South Africa, she opened her own firm, because no one else would hire her. She used it to defend anti-apartheid activists, and to win basic rights for political prisoners held on Robben Island, among them Nelson Mandela.
Her fight for the powerless was, from early on, also a fight for women. In 1992, Pillay co-founded Equality Now, an international organization built on a then-radical premise: that the abuses inflicted on women and girls around the world -- domestic violence, child marriage, female ge***al mutilation -- were not matters of "culture" to be excused, but violations of basic human rights to be confronted. The organization helped change how the world understood and prosecuted such crimes, and continues that work today.
Then came Rwanda, and a ruling that would reshape international law for women the world over. Serving as a judge and later president of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda -- convened after the 1994 genocide -- Pillay was central to a historic breakthrough: for the first time, a court established that r**e and sexual violence could constitute crimes against humanity and acts of genocide. For generations, the mass r**e of women in war had been treated as an unfortunate byproduct of conflict, rarely named and almost never punished. Pillay helped make it a prosecutable crime against humanity. In the same case, she was instrumental in another first, holding that spreading propaganda to incite genocide was itself a crime.
From there, she rose to the heights of international justice: a judge on the International Criminal Court, and, from 2008 to 2014, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. Wherever she sat, she insisted on the same principle -- that individuals and states alike must answer to the law, and that no one, however powerful, stands above it.
She has never flinched from applying that principle to the most powerful. From 2021 to 2025, Pillay chaired the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Its investigation concluded that Israel had committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and also found that Hamas had committed war crimes in its October 7, 2023, attack on Israel. To Pillay, the law either applied to everyone or it applied to no one.
That willingness is exactly what the Nobel Committee chose to honor, at a moment when the institutions of international justice are being openly attacked. Just hours after Pillay's prize was announced, the Trump administration imposed sweeping new sanctions on the International Criminal Court -- an institution Trump has worked for years to cripple in defense of his allies like Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, charged by the court with war crimes in Gaza, and, quite possibly, of himself as his own administration faces mounting war-crimes allegations over actions from Iran to the Caribbean. In response, the court called the move "an assault on the rule of law and on the very foundations of the international legal order, which strikes at the simple principle that no one stands above the law."
Pillay has never needed convincing of that principle, or courage to act on it. Asked whether her work required bravery, she waved the question away. "Why would you need courage to speak the truth?" she said. And characteristically, she deflected the honor onto the people she has spent her life defending. "Let me dedicate this award," she said, "to all of the survivors of international crimes, as well as to practitioners and defenders of international justice whose passion and courage continue to ensure that impunity will not be allowed to reign."
Congratulations to Navi Pillay on this well-deserved recognition!
--> To support the international women's rights organization Navi Pillay co-founded -- which works to end violence and discrimination against women and girls worldwide, from female ge***al mutilation to child marriage -- visit Equality Now at https://www.equalitynow.org
For a beautifully illustrated picture book to teach children about the importance of human rights, we highly recommend "Small Places, Close to Home: A Child's Declaration of Rights" at https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9780063092587 (Bookshop) and https://amzn.to/3VkAmrG (Amazon)
For books for children and teens about the importance of standing up for truth, decency, and justice, even in dark times, visit our blog post, "Dissent Is Patriotic: 50 Books About Women Who Fought for Change," at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=14364
For books for tweens and teens about girls living - without human rights protections - in nations controlled by real-life authoritarian regimes, visit our blog post "The Fragility of Freedom: Mighty Girl Books About Life Under Authoritarianism" at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=32426
