On Friday, 9 October, Jørgen Watne Frydnes, chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, stood at a podium in Oslo, announced the Nobel Peace Prize, and then had to do something committees rarely do. He asked the laureate to answer her phone. They had not been able to reach her. If she was watching, he said, and a call came in from a Norwegian number, would she “please pick up.”

The laureate is Navanethem “Navi” Pillay, 85, born in Durban to parents of Indian descent. She was once a judge of the International Criminal Court, then the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, and she now sits as an ad hoc judge at the International Court of Justice. The Associated Press, in a report carried by the Boston Globe, gave the committee’s reason in a single line: her efforts to promote peace and international law.

The call reaches Nuremberg

She was not in Oslo. She turned up in a video posted on social media by the head of Amnesty International, standing among applauding well-wishers in the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg, Germany. It was the building where the Nazi leadership was put on trial. As CBS News reported, she looked at the crowd and said: “If you clap a little bit louder I may share this prize with Trump.”

The joke landed because everyone in the room knew the background. Last year’s laureate, the Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, gave her Nobel medal to President Trump shortly after the United States ousted Nicolás Maduro. Trump has long said he deserves the prize. The committee has said the honour itself cannot be transferred, so the gift was largely a symbol.

Pillay said her first thought on hearing the news was “it must be a joke.” As “a lawyer and a judge,” she added, “I still want to verify this thing.” She also questioned the committee’s praise for her courage: “You can imagine how surprised I was. Why would you need courage to speak the truth? You interpret the law, you look at all the facts, so it’s an impartial decision you make.”

A message to the powerful

The committee did not hide what it meant by the choice. In its news release it wrote:

At a time when the number of wars and conflicts is rising, and when judges and institutions of international law are under political attack, the Nobel Committee wishes to issue a reminder that the ability to resolve conflicts without force or violence is dependent on the international rule of law.

Frydnes was blunter. “This is definitely a message to those who are undermining the international system and institutions,” he said. “The system of international law is under tremendous pressure and its institutions are under attack.” He described “a shift towards power politics at the expense of legal frameworks and global respect for law and justice.” The official press release says she led the way “with exceptional courage and integrity” towards a more comprehensive global legal order, and credits her with helping to make sure that war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide are prosecuted.

The attack the committee had in mind has a name and an address. Over the past year the Trump administration has imposed sanctions on the International Criminal Court after it issued an arrest warrant in 2024 for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The president accused the court of “illegitimate and baseless actions targeting America and our close ally Israel.” The ICC said the sanctions against its staff were intended to “harm (the Court’s) independent and impartial judicial work.”

Here a reflection, and only that: a prize committee has no police and no army. All it can do is choose whom to honour, and it has chosen a judge in a year when judges are being sanctioned.

From Durban

CBC News quoted the committee as tracing “a common thread” from “her early work defending Nelson Mandela and others who stood up against apartheid” to “her service as a judge in some of the key international court cases of our time.” Frydnes called her “one of the great defenders of international legal principles in our time.”

That thread started in a country that would not let her in. In 2022, at Harvard Law School, where she earned a master’s in 1982 and a doctorate in 1986, she described how racism, sexism and South Africa’s class structure pushed her into practising alone. “I had no choice but to start my own law practice, because no law firm would take me on,” she said. “You’re going to get the criticism. You have to face it.” The lawyer no firm would hire went on, according to the press release, to sit on South Africa’s High Court and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. She was an ICC judge from 2003 until 2008, when she resigned to become the UN’s human rights chief.

Gaza and Rakhine

Two of her recent cases ensure the prize will not be read as neutral. She chaired the UN Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, which concluded last year that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza in its military response to the Hamas-led attacks of 7 October 2023. She called Israel’s actions “a moral outrage and a legal emergency.” Israel dismissed the report as “scandalous.” JNS reported that Israeli and Jewish advocates sharply criticised Friday’s decision.

At the International Court of Justice, a separate body from the ICC, she sits in The Gambia v. Myanmar. The case was brought seven years ago and accuses Myanmar’s military junta of genocide against the Rohingya Muslim minority of Rakhine state. Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya fled to Bangladesh and elsewhere after the army launched a crushing campaign in response to attacks by an insurgent group. That campaign included accusations of indiscriminate killings and sexual violence.

The prize at 125

This is the 125th anniversary of the peace prize. The committee chose from 287 nominated candidates, just over a quarter of them organisations. Since 1901 the prize has gone to 112 individuals and 28 institutions. It has gone unawarded 19 times, mostly during the world wars. Gandhi was nominated 12 times and never won. In 1948, the year he was assassinated, no prize was given. In 1939 a Swedish member of parliament nominated Adolf Hitler, then withdrew the nomination and said it had never been meant seriously.

This was the fifth Nobel of the week, after prizes for light-controlled neurons, cosmic neutrinos, mirror-image molecules, and the poetry of Anne Carson. The economics prize follows on Monday. The peace prize is worth 12 million Swedish kronor, about $1.2 million, and will be presented in Oslo on 10 December, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death. She has until then to verify it.