Navi Pillay, the South African judge who spent her career prosecuting war crimes, won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday. President Trump, who has openly campaigned for the award, said it left “an indelible stain on the country of Norway.”
“I never heard of the person. Nobody did,” Trump told a rally in Syracuse, New York, Friday night, calling Pillay a “mystery person,” Reuters reported. “The Nobel Peace Prize has been forever discredited by a handful of radical ideologues who are anti-democracy and really enemies of civilization. And we will not forget, Norway.”
Who is Navi Pillay?
Pillay, 85, grew up in apartheid South Africa and became the first non-white woman to open a law practice in Natal province. She went on to serve as a judge on the international tribunal for Rwanda and at the International Criminal Court, and as the United Nations’ human rights chief. Most recently, she led a UN commission whose report concluded Israel committed genocide in Gaza.
The Nobel committee said the award was meant as support for international courts at a time when “judges and institutions of international law are under political attack,” RTÉ reported. The prize comes with $1.2 million.
Why is Trump angry about the Nobel Peace Prize?
Trump has said every year of his presidency that he deserves the prize. On Friday he again listed conflicts he says he resolved, and claimed, without evidence, that he prevented wars between North and South Korea, Japan and North Korea, and China and Taiwan. Experts in Oslo had said before the announcement that his war with Iran, his push to take Greenland and his attacks on international institutions ruled him out.
Pillay poked at him when she accepted. “If you clap a little bit more, I may share this prize with Trump,” she told a cheering crowd. Last year’s winner, Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, gave Trump her medal.
Hours after Pillay won, the Trump administration imposed new sanctions on the International Criminal Court, where she once served as a judge. The court called it “an assault on the rule of law.”
The BeezLoop Take
Pillay has spent 50 years trying to hold powerful people accountable for mass killing, starting under apartheid. You can disagree with her conclusions on Gaza, but “mystery person” isn’t a serious description of one of the best-known human rights lawyers alive. It’s what you say when you only measure a prize by whether you got it.
Threatening a small ally over an award its government doesn’t even choose, and sanctioning the court she served on the same day, makes the committee’s point for it. Peace prizes go to people who build up the institutions that restrain power. Attacking those institutions is the opposite.
The open question: will “we will not forget, Norway” turn into actual consequences for a NATO ally?
Also on BeezLoop: Anne Carson won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and why America stopped watching Gaza and Ukraine.
Sources: CNBC / Reuters · RTÉ · CTV News / Reuters · Guardian News (video)
