A South African lawyer with a long record in human rights work, including leading a U.N. commission that said Israel had committed genocide, won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, a decision that drew Israel’s condemnation and underscored the country’s deep isolation on the world stage.
The lawyer, Navanethem Pillay, known as Navi, has worked for decades on human rights issues, defending anti-apartheid activists like the future president and Nobel laureate Nelson Mandela. Over the years, she has variously served as a top U.N. official and as a judge on the International Criminal Court and a tribunal investigating genocide in Rwanda.
But it was Ms. Pillay’s work last year on a U.N. commission on Israel that made the Nobel committee’s announcement on Friday an intensely political decision, as it put the prize in the middle of one of the world’s most divisive issues.
That commission said that Israel was committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, a finding that Israel rejected.
Announcing the award, the Nobel committee did not explicitly mention Gaza, instead citing Ms. Pillay’s long career in human rights and a global shift toward “power politics” that had undermined respect for law and justice. The committee chair, Jorgen Watne Frydnes, called the award “a message to those who are attacking” international law.
Ms. Pillay, 85, is “one of the most respected international jurists of our time,” the committee said, calling her “instrumental in ensuring that war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide are prosecuted.”
The office of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, quickly denounced the committee in a statement, calling its members misguided and saying it had “lost its moral compass.” It also condemned Ms. Pillay’s work, accusing her of being prejudiced against Jews.
The Israeli foreign ministry went further, calling the Nobel decision a “grotesque weaponization of an award to legitimize anti-Israel hatred and prejudice.”
After learning she had won the award, Ms. Pillay, speaking at a conference of human rights lawyers in Nuremberg, Germany, said she had tried to hew only to the law and facts in her career, not politics.
“Why would you need courage to speak the truth?” she said. “You interpret the law, you look at all the facts. So it’s an impartial, you know, impartial decision-making.”
Her work on Israel and Gaza, though, was “an important part of the reasoning why she received the prize,” Mr. Frydnes, the Nobel committee chair, told reporters.
President Trump, who has been a staunch supporter of Israel and has openly angled to win the Nobel Peace Prize himself, did not immediately address Friday’s award. He did, however, share a post on his social media platform that called Ms. Pillay “an unabashed hater of America and Israel” and said that it was Mr. Trump who deserved the prize.
After receiving the news at the conference in Nuremberg, Ms. Pillay was applauded by more than a hundred fellow attendees, a video posted by the Amnesty International head, Agnès Callamard, showed.
“If you clap a little bit more, I may share this prize with Trump,” Ms. Pillay joked, apparently referring to last year’s winner, María Corina Machado, the Venezuelan opposition leader who presented her medal to the U.S. president in January.
At a brief news conference, Ms. Pillay mused that “perhaps it was meant to be” that she had received the news in Nuremberg, a city whose famous postwar trials of Nazi leaders were foundational to creating the modern international justice system.
“We are living through an era when international law and human rights are under significant political attack,” she said. Such efforts, she said, were “particularly visible with the attacks on the International Criminal Court,” which the Trump administration has vowed to dismantle “brick by brick.”
Born to a family of Indian Tamil origin, the daughter of a homemaker and a bus driver, Ms. Pillay was one of seven children who grew up in poverty in the city of Durban, on South Africa’s east coast. She came of age in a segregated city, attending a school for Indian South Africans.
As a teenager, Ms. Pillay said, she experienced apartheid’s daily injustices and witnessed the violent crackdown by police forces and vigilantes on Black South African protesters and their supporters.
“The government was oppressive, the laws were oppressive and the courts cooperated with these laws,” she said in a video published by the I.C.C. in 2017. “We had no remedies, and as a 15-year-old, I wished that we could appeal to a higher system of law, a higher institution, so that we, the victims, can get justice.”
Ms. Pillay pursued a law degree and later defended imprisoned anti-apartheid activists, including Nelson Mandela, many of whom faced terrorism charges and placed under surveillance. After the end of apartheid, Ms. Pillay became a judge on the High Court in South Africa, where she championed women’s rights and equality.
Soon, Ms. Pillay was drawn into international human rights crises. In 1995, Mr. Mandela — then South Africa’s president — appointed her as a judge at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.
Ms. Pillay is the fifth South African to be awarded the peace prize, after Mr. Mandela, the activist Albert Luthuli, former President F.W. de Klerk and Desmond Tutu, the cleric who helped bring down apartheid.
One of Ms. Pillay’s contributions to international law was her pioneering work on the gravity of sexual violence during the Rwanda conflict. In a trial at the tribunal, she pushed from the bench to define rape of women and children as a weapon of war.
In 1998, when the tribunal found a former Rwandan mayor guilty of genocide, it was the first time that rape had been defined as part of genocide. Sexual violence has since been integrated in international law as a potential war crime, a crime against humanity or an act of genocide.
Two decades later, in 2019, Ms. Pillay served as an ad hoc judge on the International Court of Justice in a case in which Myanmar was accused of genocide against the Rohingya Muslim minority. Myanmar’s government has denied the accusation, calling the campaign “clearance operations.”
Even as her work expanded beyond South Africa, she remained a prominent voice for human rights in the country, speaking out against anti-immigrant violence that flared in Durban in 2015 and chiding the South African government for having considered leaving the I.C.C. in 2016.
This year’s selection is the latest in a line of decisions by the Norwegian Nobel Committee that have carried political weight.
The year before awarding the prize to Ms. Machado, the Venezuelan opposition leader, the committee honored Nihon Hidankyo, a Japanese organization representing atomic bomb survivors, many of whom have campaigned for nuclear disarmament. In 2023, the prize went to Narges Mohammadi, Iran’s most prominent human rights activist.
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