Navi Pillay wins Nobel Peace Prize
ASouth African judge oversaw the publishing of a report by the UN Commission of Inquiry that concluded that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza
South African judge Navanethem “Navi” Pillay won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday “for her efforts to promote peace and international law,” the Norwegian Nobel Committee said.
“A common thread runs 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,” the committee said.
Pillay was the former head of the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory and a former International Criminal Court judge.
In September last year Pillay oversaw the publishing of a report by the UN Commission of Inquiry that concluded that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza and that top Israeli officials including prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu incited these acts - accusations that Israel called scandalous.
Born in South Africa, Pillay served as the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights from 2008 to 2014.
She also served as a judge of the International Criminal Court, and was president of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. In the 1960s, she joined the legal defence against apartheid after graduating.
Last year, the prize went to Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado.
Machado gave Donald Trump her Nobel medal shortly after the United States captured then-Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. But this was largely a symbolic gesture: the Nobel Committee has said the honour itself cannot be transferred.
Nominations for the prize can be made by a select group of people and organisations, including heads of state or politicians serving at a national level, university professors, directors of foreign policy institutes, past Nobel Prize recipients and members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee itself.
Four of this year’s Nobels were announced earlier this week. The Nobel for medicine went to three scientists whose work led to a tool that uses light to help unravel how the brain works.
The physics award recognised a scientist’s efforts to demystify a rare group of neutrinos. The chemistry prize recognised two scientists for untangling mysterious mirror images in molecules, a discovery that has been used to develop countless drugs.
Canadian poet, essayist and translator Anne Carson won the literature prize on Thursday for “bold and inventive” works that fuse the classical and the modern and blur the boundaries of poetry and prose.
The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences will be announced on Monday.
The prize money this year is 12 million Swedish kronor (about €1 million).
