Navi Pillay, a former ICC judge who oversaw a UN report that concluded that Israel committed genocide in Gaza, won the Nobel Peace Prize yesterday ‘for her efforts to promote peace and international law.’
Giving the prize to Pillay, 85, who has been a judge on several international courts, including the International Criminal Court and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, underlined the importance of maintaining an organised international order, the Nobel committee said in its citation.
The Hague-based ICC has long been a target of US President Donald Trump, whose campaign against it has escalated since the court announced arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister last year.
“The system of international law is under tremendous pressure, and its institutions are under attack,” the Nobel committee said.
“We see a shift towards power politics at the expense of legal frameworks and global respect for law and justice. Whenever might overtakes right, it undermines stability, trust and peaceful co-existence.”
The Nobel committee’s citation made no reference to Trump, nor Israel.
Pillay was also chair of the UN Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory that concluded last year that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza. Israel dismissed the report at the time as ‘scandalous’ and ‘fake.’
Pillay received news of the award while she was attending a legal conference in the building in Nuremberg, Germany, where the first international criminal tribunal was set up in 1945-1946 to judge the crimes of the Nazis.
“The last thing I did is the delivery of the report on Gaza, naming what’s happening there as genocide,” Pillay told a crowd gathering to celebrate the award, a video posted on social media by the head of rights group Amnesty International showed.
“If you clap a little bit more, I may share this prize with Trump,” she added, to laughter, in an apparent reference to the decision by last year’s laureate, Maria Corina Machado, to give her Nobel medal to the US president in January to help gain support for her campaign for a democratic Venezuela.
&uuid=(email))