Navi Pillay and the Women Who Changed Her Mind

The life behind the Nobel Peace Prize, and the women who helped shape her understanding of justice.

Until 9 October, I did not know her name. That day, the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced that the 2026 Peace Prize would go to Navanethem “Navi” Pillay, a South African jurist, for her efforts to promote peace and international law. She is 85. Her work has shaped international justice for decades. I simply had not been paying attention.

So I started reading. The titles came quickly: judge, tribunal president, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. Then I found something I did not expect. A story she tells against herself. As a young lawyer, she said, she was impatient with women who came to her office in tears. She thought they were weak.

I wanted to know what changed her. And what that change made possible.

The daughter, and a door her mother opened

Pillay was born on 23 September 1941 in Clairwood, a poor district of Durban, the fifth of eight children. Her Tamil grandparents had come from India as indentured labourers on the sugar plantations. Her father drove a bus. Under apartheid, the parks and beaches reserved for whites were closed to her. When she told a teacher, at ten or eleven, that she wanted to be a lawyer, he said she would need a wealthy father. Years later, people in Clairwood raised money to send her to university.

Her mother is the person I keep returning to. She was married at sixteen. As a girl she had been kept out of school because her father feared that a daughter who could write would send love letters to boys. Yet she insisted that her own children go to an English school. As the children began speaking English, Pillay recalled in a 2022 interview, their mother could not follow half of what they said. I read it as a gift with the cost built in: a mother opening a door she could not walk through herself.

The house held its contradictions. In a 2021 interview, Pillay described rules for girls that did not apply to her brothers. Stay home. No boyfriends. Cook and clean. Kneel and polish the veranda with red polish. Fewer hugs than she would have liked. Plenty of encouragement to get on with her schoolwork.

The women she did not understand

Pillay later recalled the reasons law firms gave for refusing her. Race: a white secretary could not take instructions from a Black lawyer. Class: what business could she bring to the firm? Then the question she found most hurtful: she was newly married, so what if she fell pregnant? In 1967 she opened her own practice, the first woman to do so in her province of Natal.

Then women began coming to her office. They described violence at home, controlling husbands, arranged marriages. Many of them cried. Pillay, by her own account a very confident young lawyer, was hard on them. She took their tears for weakness. She had got past so much herself.

They kept coming, and she began to listen. Domestic abuse, she realised, was not a string of private misfortunes. In 1992 she co-founded Equality Now with Jessica Neuwirth and Feryal Gharahi. Decades later she put it plainly: “All my lessons in life were learnt when other women opened my eyes.”

This is the part of her story I trust most. Beating formidable odds can leave a person with a thin theory of why others struggle: I managed, so can you. Experiencing injustice ourselves does not automatically teach us to understand everyone else’s. Pillay recognised that mistake in herself and was willing to say so.

Home, where the work followed her

As a student she met Gaby Pillay, a young lawyer. They married in 1965, choosing each other rather than entering an arranged marriage. In 1971 the security police detained him under the Terrorism Act, and she went to court to protect him from torture in custody. The couple later divorced. Gaby died in the late 1990s.

They raised two daughters. Asked in 2021 whether being a powerful judge made her a powerful mother, she dismissed the idea. She recalled coming home from major cases to a more immediate demand: “Mom, we are hungry.” She spoke of giving them room to hold their own opinions and make their own choices. She also recalled that her grandson had described her as very strict. Older people, she conceded, do not smile enough.

What a courtroom learned to hear

In 1995 Pillay was elected a judge of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Friends in NGOs had told her that if she declined, there would be no woman on the bench.

One of the tribunal’s first trials was that of Jean-Paul Akayesu, mayor of Taba commune during the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi. The original indictment contained no charges of sexual violence. Then witnesses who came to testify about the killings began describing rapes. The judges asked what had happened. Researchers and advocates had already documented widespread sexual violence. In June 1997 the prosecution amended the indictment to add sexual violence charges.

In a 2016 interview, Pillay recalled that a member of the judgment-writing team had wanted to devote only a sentence or two to the women’s experiences.

On 2 September 1998 the three judges, Laïty Kama, Lennart Aspegren and Pillay, unanimously convicted Akayesu of genocide and crimes against humanity, including rape. It was the first genocide judgment ever delivered by an international court. The judgment held that rape and sexual violence could constitute genocide when committed with the specific intent to destroy a protected group, in whole or in part. It also supplied a landmark definition of rape in international criminal law. The court held him responsible for ordering, encouraging and facilitating sexual violence carried out by others.

She has credited the courage of the women who testified despite the risks to themselves. And she has argued that a conviction is not the end of justice: survivors should help decide what remedies they need.

Listening, here, was not a soft virtue. It helped change the questions asked, the charges brought and what the law could recognise.

Her standards apply to the accused too. In 2006 she told Harvard’s law bulletin that defendants must have fair trials, and that procedure had to be impeccable for such courts to be credible.

Beyond Rwanda

After Rwanda, Pillay sat as an appeals judge at the International Criminal Court from 2003 to 2008, then served as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights until 2014. Today she serves as a judge ad hoc at the International Court of Justice in The Gambia’s case alleging genocide against the Rohingya in Myanmar.

She also chaired the UN commission of inquiry on the occupied Palestinian territory and Israel. In September 2025 the commission concluded that Israel had committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Israel rejected the report as distorted and false. In 2024 the same commission had found that Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups committed war crimes on 7 October 2023. A commission’s finding is not a court’s judgment.

When the Nobel announcement came on 9 October, Pillay was attending a forum in Nuremberg’s Courtroom 600, where Nazi leaders were tried after the Second World War. As a student too poor to take the bus home between classes, she had sat in the library reading the Nuremberg cases.

In her statement that day, she dedicated the prize to survivors of international crimes and to those who defend international justice. Attacks on that justice, she warned, risk a world in which “power, rather than law, determines whose suffering matters.”

I keep returning to the young lawyer who mistook tears for weakness, and to the older woman willing to tell that story about herself. Whose experience have I judged before I have really listened?

S.A. Sterling

Sources and further reading

Norwegian Nobel Committee. “Nobel Peace Prize for 2026.” 9 October 2026.

Omonira-Oyekanmi, Rebecca. “An interview with Navi Pillay.” Lacuna Magazine, 1 November 2016. Includes Pillay’s interview with Madhu Mehra.

Crossette, Barbara. “Born Under Apartheid, Navi Pillay Has Climbed to Global Heights in Promoting Human Rights Law.” PassBlue, 12 September 2022.

Saba, Athandiwe. “Q&A Sessions: Judge Navi Pillay, a woman of many firsts.” Mail & Guardian, 24 June 2021.

International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. The Prosecutor v. Jean-Paul Akayesu, Case No. ICTR-96-4-T, Judgment. 2 September 1998.

Newburger, Emily. “The bus driver’s daughter.” Harvard Law Bulletin, 23 April 2006.

Pillay, Navi. “Statement by Judge Navi Pillay on the awarding of the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize.” 9 October 2026.