Nobel Peace Prize winner Navanethem “Navi” Pillay poked fun at President Donald Trump in the moments immediately after learning she had been named this year’s honoree.
In a video shared on X, Pillay could be heard jokingly telling her supporters, “If you hit a little more, I might share this award with Trump.” Her comment was met with laughter from her supporters in the room. She was in Nuremberg, Germany, when she found out the news.
Pillay, 85, was there attending a forum, in the same city where Nazi war criminals were put on trial after the Second World War. She was in the same room where the tests took place when she was announced as the winner of the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize.
The South African-born lawyer and former UN human rights chief has built a decades-long career in her lifetime. Through her work, she has done everything from defending the rights of Nelson Mandela who was in prison at the time to leading a panel that concluded Israel committed genocide in Gaza. The Nobel Peace Prize Committee said on Friday that she was chosen in honor of her work promoting international law at a time when it is under attack.
An amazing moment. Navi Pillay has received the Nobel Peace Prize! We are at the Nuremberg Tribunal; I can’t think of a stronger symbol for her Nobel prize. We are all so happy! Here are her first thoughts when she heard the news: https://t.co/Crbj6XdiyQ
— Agnes Callamard (@AgnesCallamard) October 9, 2026
“This year’s laureate has been instrumental in ensuring the arrest of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide,” the Norwegian Nobel Peace Prize Committee wrote in a statement on Friday, explaining its decision to award Pillay on the 125th anniversary of the award. “In a time full of challenges – including more wars and conflicts than the world has seen in a long time – international law is now only an improvement on peace and security. It is an absolute necessity.”
“The international legal system is under great pressure, and its institutions are under attack,” the committee continued. “In awarding the Nobel Peace Prize this year, the Norwegian Nobel Committee wants to remind the world that the rule of law – national and international – is the foundation of the system we have established to ensure peace and resolve conflicts without violence. Peace requires justice.”
Both US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have rejected the genocidal findings of Pillay’s UN commission regarding Gaza.
“The Nobel Prize committee has lost its moral compass,” the official X account for Netanyahu’s office wrote on Friday in response to Pillay’s win. “She has given the highest honor to a bigot who built his career around creating and spreading a blood libel against one Jewish state.”
Pillay’s dig at Trump comes a year after Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado was awarded the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts fighting tyranny in Venezuela. She won despite President Trump’s open campaign for the award. Machado later presented the Nobel prize to Trump, after the United States removed President Nicolás Maduro from power in Venezuela.
However, the Nobel Committee has declared that the move is purely symbolic, saying that the prize itself cannot be moved by a winner.