Nobel Peace Prize Awarded to International Jurist Navi Pillay

The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to a South African-born international jurist and former U.N. human rights commissioner, Navi Pillay, on Friday, two days after U.S. President Donald Trump said he deserved it for ending eight wars.

The chair of the Nobel committee, Jorgen Watne Frydnes, said Pillay’s “exceptional courage and integrity has led the way towards a more comprehensive global legal order” as he announced the prize in Oslo, Norway.

He said the 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.”

“Whenever might overtakes right it undermines stability, trust and peaceful co-existence,” Frydnes said.

The president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, congratulated Pillay in a post on X, and described her as “the defender of the persecuted, the vulnerable, the voiceless and the excluded.”

“In a world that needs justice more than ever, her courage and moral clarity are a precious compass,” von der Leyen posted.

A spokesperson for the U.N. human rights office, Shabia Mantoo, welcomed the news.

“It is amazing ​news, ​we need ​more dedication and commitment ⁠to human rights,” she told reporters in Geneva.

Maria Corina Machado, a Venezuelan politician and former opposition presidential candidate, won the prize last year. A few months later, she offered to share it with Trump after the United States ousted Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro. The Norwegian Nobel Institute responded by saying that the prize could not be shared or transferred.

“They have a reputation for maybe not giving it to people like me,” Trump said on Wednesday.

Pillay, who is 85, was born in South Africa and was at one time Nelson Mandela’s lawyer. She was later elected by the U.N. General Assembly to be a judge at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, where she served for eight years.

Frydnes said she had also chaired a U.N. commission of inquiry in the “occupied Palestinian territories.”

“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,” said the committee in a statement.

Trump Nominated by Azerbaijan, Pakistan

Azerbaijan President Ilhan Aliyev posted on Friday that he had jointly nominated Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize.

“President Donald Trump played a historic role in advancing peace between Azerbaijan and Armenia at the Washington Peace Summit he hosted on August 8, 2025,” Aliyev wrote.

Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif also nominated Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize, he said in a post on X on Friday.

“His timely intervention helped bring Pakistan and India back from the brink and secure a ceasefire, that is holding till today,” Sharif wrote.

At the U.N. General Assembly in September 2025, Trump listed the conflicts he said he had ended.

“I ended seven wars, and in all cases, they were raging, with countless thousands of people being killed,” he said.

“This includes Cambodia and Thailand, Kosovo and Serbia, the Congo and Rwanda—a vicious, violent war that was—Pakistan and India, Israel and Iran, Egypt and Ethiopia, and Armenia and Azerbaijan.

“No president or prime minister—and for that matter, no other country—has ever done anything close to that.”

Trump Won FIFA Peace Prize

In December 2025, Trump was awarded the inaugural FIFA Peace Prize by Gianni Infantino, the president of world soccer’s governing body, ahead of the draw for the 2026 World Cup in North America.

Infantino said the prize was recognition for Trump’s “exceptional and extraordinary action to promote peace and unity around the world.”

Among the other contenders for the Nobel Prize this year were Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, the International Space Station, emergency teams in Sudan, children’s advocates in Ukraine, and two international courts.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee in Oslo received nominations for 287 candidates, just more than a quarter of which related to organizations.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.