The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Navi Pillay for her work as a judge and human rights lawyer, at a time when the committee said international law faces “tremendous pressure” and its institutions are “under attack.”
Pillay, 85, has “held states and national leaders accountable and brought hope to victims of violence and conflict,” the Norwegian Nobel Committee said in a statement on Friday, calling her “one of the great defenders of international legal principles.”
Pillay is currently serving as a judge at the International Court of Justice, in The Hague, in the case in which Myanmar stands accused of genocide. Last year, she chaired the U.N. Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, which investigated Israel’s retaliatory war in Gaza and concluded that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s administration had committed genocide against Palestinians, a finding that the Israeli government firmly denounced.
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