Nobel Peace Prize laureate Navi Pillay took a playful swipe at Donald Trump on Friday after being recognised for her work advancing peace and international law.
The South African jurist and former UN high commissioner for human rights joked that she could share the honour with the US president if the applause continued.
‘If you clap a little bit more I may share this prize with Trump,’ Ms Pillay said in a video posted on X by Amnesty International’s secretary general. The footage showed her receiving applause after the Nobel announcement.
The decision is likely to disappoint Mr Trump, who placed extraordinary pressure on the Norwegian Nobel Committee last year in an effort to secure the award.
Ms Pillay’s Nobel Peace Prize win is expected to be viewed as a high-profile rebuke to Mr Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Both men have rejected the findings of a UN commission she chaired, which concluded that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza. They have also repeatedly criticised the institutions where Ms Pillay has held senior positions.
Israel condemned the decision to honour the jurist, arguing that it gave legitimacy to what it called ‘anti-Israel hatred’. It also invoked Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, saying he must be ‘applauding from hell’.
‘Now that the Nobel commission has rewarded the biggest lie of the 21st century, Joseph Goebbels is certainly applauding from hell,’ Israel’s foreign ministry said in a post on X.
Ms Pillay chaired the Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel, established by the UN-backed Human Rights Council.
Nobel Peace Prize winner Navi Pillay taunted Donald Trump after receiving the award on Friday
South African jurist and former UN high commissioner for human rights Navi Pillay was honoured for her efforts to promote peace and international law
Winning the Nobel Peace Prize has long been an unfulfilled ambition for Donald Trump
A year ago, the commission concluded that Israel was responsible for genocide in Gaza and had acted with the specific intent of destroying Palestinians there.
It also said that Israel’s president, prime minister and former defence minister had ‘incited the commission of genocide’.
Israel, which has declined to cooperate with the commission since its creation in 2021, has strongly rejected the allegations.
‘The Nobel Prize committee has lost its moral compass,’ Israel’s prime minister’s office said on X. ‘It has awarded its highest honour to a bigot who built her career around inventing and propagating blood libels against the one and only Jewish state.
‘Navi Pillay’s proudest achievement was to legitimise a corrupt prosecutor who turned to her fabrications against Israel hoping that by joining her bigoted lynch mob, he would beat a rape charge. Karim Khan, who was accused by his own ICC employees of raping and sexually molesting them, used Pillay’s lies to build a fake case against Israel.
‘Pillay supplied the lies. Khan weaponised them. And now the misguided members of the Nobel Committee are honouring the woman who propagated this demonisation of the Jews and this travesty of justice.’
Members of the International Criminal Court voted in July to remove Khan as chief prosecutor over alleged sexual misconduct.
He has repeatedly denied every allegation, while his lawyer said he would challenge ‘the lawfulness and fairness of the decision through all available legal mechanisms’.
Announcing Ms Pillay’s award in Oslo, Jørgen Watne Frydnes, chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, said her work ‘is a source of hope and inspiration to all those who seek to bring about a more peaceful world’.
While her work has been global in scope, criticism often has been fiercely local, notably in places like Israel and in apartheid-era South Africa as she and peers took on some of the world’s most painful and sensitive legal issues and most vulnerable populations.
Ms Pillay, 85, received the news while attending the Nuremberg Forum, a gathering to discuss international law in Nuremberg, Germany, the location of the trials of Nazi war criminals that helped lay the foundations of international law.
‘Firstly, at this venue, your applause means a great deal to me,’ she said to a standing ovation. ‘You know, you don’t want to receive an award, prize or anything unless the public agrees that you deserve this.’
And joking, she added: ‘But being a lawyer and a judge, I still want to verify this information.’
Winning a Nobel Peace Prize has long been something of an unfulfilled dream for Mr Trump.
Pakistan announced it had nominated him for the prize once again this year for playing a ‘historic role in advancing peace in South Asia’.
Ms Pillay has repeatedly rejected accusations from critics who accused her of anti-Semitism or allegedly turning a blind eye to the Hamas attacks in Israel.
In an interview with the AP last year, she recalled how she worked closely with some Jewish lawyers in the fight against apartheid in her native South Africa and was invited to Israel as the UN rights chief from 2008 to 2014.
Ms Pillay’s win brings renewed attention to Mr Trump’s ongoing feud with the ICC.
The Trump administration already has sanctioned 13 of the ICC’s staff members, among them key prosecutors and nine judges including the court’s Japanese President Tomoko Akane.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has launched what he called a ‘sweeping campaign to dismantle the threat posed by the International Criminal Court’.
In his speech to the United Nations General Assembly last month, Mr Trump called the court an ‘out of control institution’ and an ‘anti-American tribunal with no jurisdiction’ over the US as he urged member states to quit the ‘rogue institution immediately’.
There are fears the court as a whole could be sanctioned, a move that could seriously hamper its ability to mete out justice.
The Norwegian committee said it sought to strengthen international law at a time of conflict.
‘At a time when the number of wars and conflicts is rising, and when judges and institutions of international law are under political attack, the Nobel Committee wishes to issue a reminder that the ability to resolve conflicts without force or violence is dependent on the international rule of law,’ the committee wrote in a news release.
Ms Pillay is currently serving as an ad hoc judge at the International Court of Justice, the highest court of the UN, in the ongoing genocide case against Myanmar.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee in Oslo received nominations for 287 candidates for this year’s prize, with just over a quarter of them organisations.
Experts say the committee typically focuses on the durability of peace, the promotion of international fraternity and the quiet work of institutions that strengthen those goals.
Nominations can be made by a select group of people and organisations, including heads of state or politicians serving at a national level, university professors, directors of foreign policy institutes, past Nobel Prize recipients and members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee itself.
Four of this year’s Nobel prizes were announced this week.
The Nobel for medicine went to three scientists whose work led to a tool that uses light to help unravel how the brain works.
The physics award recognised a scientist’s efforts to demystify a rare group of neutrinos.
The chemistry prize recognised two scientists for untangling mysterious mirror images in molecules, a discovery that has been used to develop countless drugs.
Canadian poet, essayist and translator Anne Carson won the literature prize Thursday for ‘bold and inventive’ works that fuse the classical and the modern and blur the boundaries of poetry and prose.
The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences will be announced Monday.
The prize money this year is 12 million Swedish kronor (about £910,000), whether for an individual, small group of laureates or organisation.
Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado won the prize in 2025 for her struggle to achieve a democratic transition in the South American nation, winning recognition as a woman ‘who keeps the flame of democracy burning amid a growing darkness’.
She had not been seen in public since January of that year, when she led demonstrations against then-president Nicolas Maduro, who had been re-elected, despite widely being considered a dictator.
Machado dedicated the prize to the US president for ‘his decisive support of our cause’ and gave him her Nobel medal shortly after Maduro was ousted in January of this year.
The gesture was largely symbolic, however, as the Nobel Committee has stated the honour itself cannot be transferred.