Human Rights Lawyer Navi Pillay Is Awarded Nobel Peace Prize Ms. Pillay has served as a judge in her native South Africa and on international courts investigating war crimes. She led a U.N. panel that determined that Israel had committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, a finding the Israeli government rejected.

Latest Navi Pillay, a South African human rights lawyer and international judge, was announced on Friday as the recipient of the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize for what the Norwegian Nobel Committee called her efforts to uphold a system of international law that is increasingly under attack.

While Ms. Pillay’s work spans decades, the committee’s decision to choose her this year carries distinct political undertones. She led a U.N. commission last year that said that Israel had committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, a finding that the Israeli government rejected. Ms. Pillay’s native South Africa has also spearheaded accusations of genocide against Israel in the international court system.

Though the Nobel committee did not explicitly mention Gaza in its statement honoring Ms. Pillay, its chairman, Jorgen Watne Frydnes, told reporters that her work on the U.N. commission was “an important part of the reasoning why she received the prize.”The office of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, quickly denounced the committee in a statement, calling its members misguided and saying it had “lost its moral compass.”He also condemned Ms. Pillay’s work, accusing her of being prejudiced against Jews.

Danny Danon, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, told The New York Times that honoring Ms. Pillay “would not only damage the credibility of the Nobel Committee, but also tarnish the legacy of the distinguished laureates who have received this honor throughout history.”The Nobel committee said that Ms. Pillay, 85, had been “instrumental in ensuring that war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide are prosecuted.”Formerly the United Nations’ top human rights official, and a judge at the International Criminal Court and on an international tribunal investigating the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, she is “one of the most respected international jurists of our time,” the committee said.

“Let me dedicate this award to all the survivors of international crimes as well as to practitioners and defenders of international justice,” Ms. Pillay said at a news conference in Germany.

President Trump, who has been a staunch supporter of Israel and has openly angled for the Nobel Peace Prize to be awarded to himself, did not directly address the committee’s decision. However, he did share a post on his social media platform, Truth Social, that said that Mr. Trump, and not Ms. Pillay, was deserving of the prize.

Ms. Pillay was recognized “for her long career, from standing up for Nelson Mandela to the present-day work,” Mr. Frydnes said. Born in Durban, South Africa, to a family of Indian Tamil origin, Ms. Pillay defended Mr. Mandela and others who confronted apartheid.

The Nobel announcement came as wars rage in Europe and in the Middle East, and as the Trump administration systematically targets several of the institutions that Ms. Pillay worked on. The Nobel committee said that a global shift toward “power politics” had undermined respect for law and justice, and that the award was “a message to those who are attacking” it.

Ms. Pillay, who was at an annual conference of human rights lawyers and judges at the Nuremberg Palace of Justice when the news broke, said at a news conference that she was “still reeling with surprise.”

“We are living through an era when international law and human rights are under significant political attack,” she said, adding it was “particularly visible with the attacks on the International Criminal Court,” which the Trump administration has vowed to dismantle “brick by brick.”Here’s what else to know: The prize: The prize is awarded annually to a person or organization that has advanced “fraternity between nations,” worked toward disarmament or promoted peace conferences, according to the 1895 will of Alfred Nobel, the creator of the prize, although the criteria have expanded. The Nobel Prizes come with a financial award, which this year amounts to about $1.2 million, and the winner is decided in secret by a committee of five people appointed by the Norwegian Parliament.

Past winner: Last year, the prize went to María Corina Machado, the Venezuelan opposition leader. She presented her medal to President Trump after U.S. troops captured Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s president, although the Norwegian Nobel Institute said the award itself cannot be transferred. On Friday, Ms. Pillay joked after receiving applause for the award that “if you clap a little bit more, I may share this prize with Trump.”Hours after the prize was awarded, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced new sanctions on the International Criminal Court. “We will ban transactions with this rogue court, cutting off their resources and crippling its ability to operate,” he said in a statement.

The U.N. secretary general, António Guterres, condemned the action, calling it a “serious blow to our collective pursuit of international criminal justice, of which the I.C.C. is a key pillar.”Earlier Friday, he praised the Nobel committee for awarding the Peace Prize to Pillay, a former I.C.C. judge. Guterres’s dual statements captured the challenges he has faced in dealing with the United States, once regarded as the pillar of international order and law.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu led Israel’s denunciations on Friday of the decision to award the Nobel Peace Prize to Navi Pillay, a human rights lawyer who was drawn into the international spotlight last year when a United Nations commission she chaired found that Israel was committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.

In a statement, Mr. Netanyahu called the decision by the Norwegian Nobel Committee misguided and said it had “lost its moral compass.”He also condemned Ms. Pillay’s work, accusing her of being prejudiced against Jews.

The Israeli foreign ministry, in a post on social media, denounced it as “the grotesque weaponization of an award to legitimize anti-Israel hatred and prejudice.”Danny Danon, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, also questioned the integrity of the award. Honoring Ms. Pillay with the prize, he said through a spokesman, would damage “the credibility of the Nobel Committee,” and “tarnish the legacy of the distinguished laureates who have received this honor throughout history. Winning the Nobel Prize will not make her false conclusions about Israel any more truthful.”

While the prize’s announcement included only a brief mention of her work on the commission’s investigation into the war in Gaza, Jorgen Watne Frydnes, the chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, said the work had played an important part in the decision.

The September 2025 finding by the panel, the U.N. Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, is among its most sweeping about the Israeli government’s conduct in the war and drew fierce criticism from Israel. The commission’s report said that some of Israel’s most senior leaders had “incited the commission of genocide.”

Last October, Ms. Pillay, a South African, said in a statement that “the actions of the Israeli government have consistently pointed toward a singular, harrowing objective — the systematic destruction of Palestinian life in Gaza.”Israel has repeatedly rejected allegations of genocide from scholars and human rights groups.

When the commission’s findings were released, Israeli officials quickly disputed them and criticized the panel’s members. The country’s foreign ministry called the commission’s three members “notorious for their openly antisemitic positions” and “Hamas proxies,” referring to the Palestinian militant group that led the attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Isaac Herzog, the Israeli president, called the commission “morally bankrupt” and said it “obsesses over blaming the Jewish state.”

Ms. Pillay rebutted the criticism at the time. “I would prefer that our critics tell us: Where did we go wrong?” she said. “Which piece of that evidence is false, and why?”Ms. Pillay brought extensive legal expertise on genocide to the inquiry. She spent eight years as part of the International Criminal Tribunal on the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, as a judge and then as the president. It was the first tribunal to interpret the definition of genocide set out in the U.N.’s 1948 Genocide Convention and the first to convict a defendant for the crime of genocide.

In June 2024, more than a year before the genocide finding against Israel, Ms. Pillay’s commission issued a report that accused members of Palestinian armed groups of committing war crimes during the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel from Gaza, which it said involved a pattern of sexual violence.

In late 2023, South Africa, one of the most vocal critics of Israel’s war in Gaza, brought a case before the International Court of Justice, the U.N.’s top court, accusing Israel of committing genocide. Israel dismissed the claim as lacking factual or legal basis. The case remains active.

Hamas-led gunmen killed about 1,200 people in the Oct. 7 attack, according to the Israeli authorities, and took about 250 more back to Gaza as hostages, in the deadliest day of violence in the country’s history. Israel responded with a devastating war in Gaza that has killed at least 74,000 people, according to local health officials, who do not distinguish between civilians and combatants, and leveled much of the enclave. Nick Cumming-Bruce contributed reporting.

One of Navi Pillay’s contributions to international law is her pioneering work on the gravity of sexual violence during conflict. As a judge on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, she pushed from the bench to define the rape of women and children as a weapon of war instead of “collateral damage.”In 1998, when that tribunal found a former Rwandan mayor guilty of genocide, it was the first time that rape had been defined as part of genocide. Sexual violence has since been integrated in international law as a potential war crime, a crime against humanity or an act of genocide.

Navi Pillay’s life has been a journey from living in poverty in apartheid-era South Africa to becoming a celebrated human rights lawyer overseeing some of the world’s most high-profile cases, and now, a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.

While many know Ms. Pillay for her early work against apartheid, or more recently for leading a United Nations commission investigating the war in Gaza, she has also worked on other important international human rights issues of the last few decades.

Ms. Pillay, who is of Indian Tamil origin, was born in 1941 in Durban, a city on South Africa’s east coast. Her father was a bus driver. She was one of seven children.

“Most people assume that, in my country, you are Indian, you are better off than the African people,” she said in a video shared by the U.N. Human Rights Council last year. But, she said, “All of us were poor, and we struggled together.”In 1995, Ms. Pillay was elected by the United Nations General Assembly to serve as a judge on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. The tribunal was established to prosecute those responsible for the 1994 killings of some 800,000 people, most of them ethnic Tutsis, in a massacre now known as the Rwandan genocide.

“Working in the Rwanda Tribunal was extremely difficult,” Ms. Pillay said in the video shared by the Human Rights Council, noting that investigators were working out of a rural area with no supermarket, bank or postal addresses that could receive mail.

“I complained and complained about that, until I started listening to the witnesses,” she said, adding: “What am I complaining about when they’ve been through so much suffering?”During her time on the court, she helped establish a number of important legal principles, according to the Norwegian Nobel Committee. She was influential in establishing that rape and sexual violence could constitute acts of genocide, and for the first time, the court charged someone with incitement to commit genocide for spreading propaganda, the committee said.

In 2003, she was appointed as a judge on the International Criminal Court in The Hague. In 2008, she became the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, serving in the position for six years. During her tenure, she worked to combat violence and discrimination and protect L.G.B.T.Q. people. She also pushed for accountability in conflict zones, including in Syria and the Occupied Palestinian territories.

“She was very strong in accountability and reconciliation,” said M.A. Sumanthiran, a former member of Sri Lanka’s Parliament, said in an interview.

In 2013, Ms. Pillay traveled to Sri Lanka to investigate human rights abuses following the country’s 26-year civil war. A formal mechanism for investigating such crimes was set up during her tenure.

Last year, a United Nations commission led by Ms. Pillay determined that Israel had committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, a finding that the Israeli government rejected.

Ms. Pillay currently serves as a judge in a case at the International Court of Justice in which Myanmar is accused of genocide for its deadly purge of Rohingya Muslims. The country has forced hundreds of thousands of people to flee under a campaign of rape, arson and killing. Myanmar has always denied accusations of ethnic cleansing and genocide.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee said on Friday that Ms. Pillay had been “instrumental in ensuring that war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide are prosecuted,” calling her “one of the great defenders of international legal principles in our time.”Pamodi Waravita contributed reporting from Colombo.

The United Nations secretary general, António Guterres, congratulated Pillay and praised her as “a champion of international law and human rights, and a steadfast, independent voice of justice amidst some of the most historic international legal cases of our time.”In a statement, Guterres said that Pillay, who served as the U.N.’s top human rights authority, had shown that the law must always prevail and that defending human rights was the surest safeguard against injustice.

“Today’s prize is a tribute to all those working to uphold and defend international law, the rule of law and human rights, and secure peace, justice and human dignity,” Guterres said.

In awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Navi Pillay, a leading international lawyer and judge, the Nobel Committee has affirmed the importance of international law at a moment when it is under threat, in what amounts to an implicit rebuke of President Trump and other world leaders who are increasingly hostile to that system.

“In awarding this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, the Norwegian Nobel Committee wants to remind the world that the rule of law — national and international — underpins the system we have set up to ensure peace and resolve conflicts nonviolently,” the committee said in its prize announcement on Friday. But today, it continued, the judges on international courts who “guard the thin red line between order and chaos” are “sanctioned, and their institutions are attacked.”

That was a clear reference to the Trump administration’s attacks on the international legal order. President Trump had previously imposed sanctions on a number of the judges and lawyers at the International Criminal Court over its investigations into actions by Israelis and Americans, and has said that he believes his power is constrained only by his “own morality,” not by international law. Marco Rubio, his secretary of state, has vowed to dismantle the court “brick by brick,” if necessary.

Hours after the prize was announced, Mr. Rubio announced new sanctions on the court, this time targeting the I.C.C. as an institution. “We will ban transactions with this rogue court, cutting off their resources and crippling its ability to operate,” he said in a statement.

The court, based in the Netherlands, has authority to try war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide, though its jurisdiction is limited to the territory and nationals of its member states. The United States is not a member state, but the court could still seek to try U.S. citizens for their actions overseas.

Although the current U.S. presidential administration is by far the most powerful voice of opposition to the international legal order, and the I.C.C. more specifically, it is not alone. Russia has tried and sentenced eight I.C.C. judges in absentia for their roles in issuing a warrant for the arrest of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia for his actions in Ukraine. Venezuela and Chad both recently announced their decisions to withdraw from the court as well.

Ms. Pillay herself is not under U.S. sanctions. Nor does she currently work for the I.C.C., though she was a judge there in the past. But her accomplishments over her long career, as well as her more recent work on contentious questions of genocide law, make her an excellent vehicle for the Nobel Committee’s message about the importance of the international legal system, said Alex Whiting, a Harvard Law School professor and former international prosecutor.

“Her career spans the development and creation of international criminal law in its modern form,” Mr. Whiting said. “It really does capture the sweep of modern international criminal law and human rights.”Giving Ms. Pillay the prize “shows both the promise of this work and its importance, and the jeopardy that it’s now under,” he said.

By contrast, giving the prize to the I.C.C. directly — which had been rumored to be in contention for the award — would have seemed more like a negative message of opposition to the Trump administration rather than a positive message of support for international law, he said.

Ms. Pillay has also been at the center of the debate over the most contentious question of international law in recent years: how to define and punish the crime of genocide. She led a United Nations commission that concluded in 2025 that Israel’s actions in Gaza constituted genocide, findings that Israel has vehemently denied.

She is also currently sitting as an ad hoc judge on a case against Myanmar at the International Court of Justice, the United Nations’ highest court, which alleges that Myanmar committed genocide against the Rohingya ethnic minority. Previously, as a judge on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, she contributed to rulings that established that sexual violence and propaganda could constitute genocide.

The Rwanda tribunal, along with a tribunal for the former Yugoslavia that worked over a similar period, were foundational to the project of establishing international criminal law, Mr. Whiting said. “They were ultimately incredibly successful and really were a model of how this work can be done.”Today, with that project under threat, her career serves as a potent example of both what is possible and of how fragile that progress can be.

Awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Navi Pillay, a South African human rights lawyer and international judge, further solidifies a trend toward a kind of recipient quite different from a century ago.

In his will, the Swedish chemist and businessman Alfred Nobel bequeathed much of his fortune — amassed, in part, through his invention of dynamite — to creating the prizes that carry his name. For the Peace Prize, he said that the recipient “shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”The first Peace Prize, in 1901, was shared by Henry Dunant, who founded the International Committee of the Red Cross, and Frédéric Passy, a French pacifist and economist.

For nearly six decades, the prize’s recipients were most often white Western men like them, or organizations led by such men. The choices reflected not just who had more obvious power in the world at the time, but also who was seen as deserving by the Nobel committee.

Change started in the early 1960s, during decolonization, when Albert Luthuli, a South African anti-apartheid leader, was awarded the prize. With that designation, the Norwegian committee that bestows the award began incorporating the notion of championing human rights into its criteria. That decade’s winners included Martin Luther King Jr. and René Cassin, the architect of the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The criteria have since expanded to include environmental work. Geir Lundestad, who from 1990 to 2014 was the director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute, which houses and collaborates with the Nobel committee, wrote in a book detailing the prize’s history that it was “not difficult to link” environmentalism and peacemaking. One would be “hard pressed,” he wrote, “to find a clearer example of fraternity between nations than the attempts to save our planet from global warming.”

To be sure, many prize recipients are still drawn from the ranks of the world’s powerful. Those choices are often controversial. In 2009, Barack Obama received the award just nine months into his first presidential term, at a time when the U.S. military was engaged in Afghanistan and Iraq and he had begun authorizing counterterrorism operations that included targeted killings via drone strikes. In 2019, the award went to Ethiopia’s prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, who soon after embarked on a devastating, scorched-earth campaign against rebels in the north of his country.

Still, the selection committee in Norway has hewed toward a more expansive definition of who qualifies for the prize in recent years. Many recent recipients have been markedly more grass roots: Activists, journalists and organizations promoting democracy have won, and this year even the crew of the International Space Station was considered a front runner.

When Navi Pillay was announced as the recipient of the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, her work as a human rights lawyer and international judge was thrust into the international spotlight. But in her native South Africa, she was already known by many for fighting apartheid.

President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa said in a statement on Friday that Ms. Pillay’s award “allows us to celebrate the progressive contributions she has made to strengthen peace, uphold human dignity and bring hope in South Africa and to peoples globally.”Ms. Pillay, 85, was born to a family of Indian Tamil origin. The daughter of a bus driver, she was one of seven children who grew up in poverty in the city of Durban, on South Africa’s east coast. She came of age in a segregated city, attending a school for Indian South Africans.

As a teenager, Ms. Pillay said she experienced some of apartheid’s daily injustices and witnessed the violent crackdown on protests by Black South Africans.

“The government was oppressive, the laws were oppressive and the courts cooperated with these laws,” she said in a video published by the International Criminal Court in 2017. “We had no remedies and as a 15-year-old, I wished that I could appeal to a higher system of law, a higher institution so that we, the victims, can get justice.”Ms. Pillay pursued a law degree and later defended anti-apartheid activists, many of whom faced terrorism charges or were “banned” and placed under surveillance.

Ms. Pillay, who fought so that prisoners like Nelson Mandela could have legal representation, faced scrutiny for her work.

After the end of apartheid, Ms. Pillay became a judge on South Africa’s High Court and championed women’s rights and equality.

Ms. Pillay was soon drawn into international human rights crises. In 1995, she was appointed as a judge at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and she has continued to work outside of South Africa. Still, she remained a prominent voice for human rights in the country, speaking out against anti-immigrant violence that flared in Durban in 2015 and chiding the South African government when it considered leaving the International Criminal Court in 2016.

Ms. Pillay is the fifth South African to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, alongside Albert Luthuli, Nelson Mandela, F.W. de Klerk and Desmond Tutu. Navi Pillay closed out her brief news conference in Nuremberg, Germany, with a reminder to any heads of state that might be listening: “My message to political leaders is that you are under legal obligation,” she said.

“You have a legal obligation to protect human rights and refrain from war.”

At a brief news conference in Nuremberg, Germany, Navi Pillay said she dedicated her award to “the survivors of international crimes and to the defenders of international justice.”She mused that “perhaps it was meant to be” that she received the news in a city whose famous post-war trials of Nazi leaders were foundational to creating the modern international justice system. But she offered a warning, too, saying that efforts to undermine the system “risk returning us to a world in which power rather than law determines whose suffering matters.”

Speaking at a conference of human rights lawyers in Nuremberg, Germany, Navi Pillay said she was “surprised” that some people had praised her courage. “Why would you need courage to speak the truth?” she said. “You interpret the law, you look at all the facts. So it’s an impartial, you know, impartial decision-making.”Navi Pillay was attending a conference of human rights lawyers in Nuremberg, Germany, when she got the news that she had been given the Nobel Peace Prize.

A video posted online by Agnes Callamard, the secretary general of Amnesty International, showed Pillay smiling and being applauded by fellow attendees. “Thank you very much,” Pillay told the crowd. “If you clap a little bit more, I may share this prize with Trump,” she joked, apparently referring to President Trump, who has long coveted the award.

For most of the past 125 years, five Norwegians appointed by the country’s Parliament have gathered in secret to choose the winner, or winners, of the Nobel Peace Prize. The committee meets in a 19th-century mansion in Oslo called the Norwegian Nobel Institute, in a room with an oval table, a painting of Alfred Nobel — the Swedish inventor who established the prize — and rows of framed photos of past winners.

On Friday, the Norwegian Nobel Committee named the South African human rights lawyer Navi Pillay as this year’s recipient. There were 287 candidates officially nominated — 208 individuals and 79 organizations — though the committee can add its own nominees.

The committee keeps each list of nominees secret for 50 years. But names can be made public by whomever made the nomination. Leaders of several countries have said that they would nominate President Trump, who has made his interest in the award no secret.

The list of those who can submit nominations includes heads of state, government ministers and some international court judges, as well as university professors and past winners.

An initial short list is usually ready by April. That list can be as long as 40 candidates or as short as a dozen, Kristian Berg Harpviken, the director of the institute, said in an interview.

Meetings of the committee are scheduled as full days. They happen most frequently after the summer, usually every two weeks or “if there is a need, even more frequently,” Mr. Harpviken said.

The director joins the deliberations but does not vote. He prepares dossiers and enlists academics to write reviews on candidates for the committee’s consideration.

Inside the room, “there is friction,” Mr. Harpviken said. “And there should be friction. Different perspectives and concerns are on the table.”A consensus is ideal, but the recipient can be selected by a majority vote, Mr. Harpviken said.

“Sometimes it may be self-evident who should be the laureate,” Mr. Harpviken said. Other years “may be more difficult.”Some committee members have resigned in protest over the winner, such as when the award went to Yasir Arafat in 1994, or Henry Kissinger in 1973.

Mr. Harpviken calls the winner — or tries to — shortly before the name is announced.

“You are delivering a message that is changing people’s lives without asking for their permission,” Mr. Harpviken said. “That’s something the committee thinks and reflects a lot on. That’s an ethical responsibility that needs to be taken seriously.”The five committee members are appointed by the Norwegian Parliament, as per instructions in Mr. Nobel’s will, and the composition reflects the “relative strengths of the political parties.”Committee members serve for six years and are eligible for re-election. The members are: Jorgen Watne Frydnes, the chair, is the director of PEN Norway, the Norwegian branch of an international nonprofit that supports writers at risk or in prison.

Asle Toje, the vice chair, worked as the Nobel Institute’s research director before joining the committee in 2018. He has said his favorite part of the process is reading the first list of nominations and seeing names he expects and those he does not.

Anne Enger was Norway’s culture minister and, briefly, acting prime minister in the late 1990s.

Kristin Clemet was labor minister from 1989 to 1990 and education minister from 2001 to 2005. Gry Larsen previously served as a state secretary in the foreign affairs ministry. Laura Chung contributed reporting.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry denounced the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Navi Pillay, who had chaired a United Nations commission that accused Israel of committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. “Awarding Pillay the Nobel Peace Prize isn’t a recognition of justice. It’s the grotesque weaponization of an award to legitimize anti-Israel hatred and prejudice,” the ministry said in a post on The chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Jorgen Watne Frydnes, told the world on Friday morning that Navi Pillay had won the Nobel Peace Prize.

One person who hadn’t been informed yet: Ms. Pillay.

“My message to her would be: If you see a Norwegian number calling, please pick up,” Mr. Frydnes said at the announcement in Oslo. “I would love to talk to you very soon.”

Ms. Pillay, a South African jurist, was at an annual conference of human rights lawyers and judges in Nuremberg, Germany. When the news of her award broke, Stephen Rapp, a former U.S. ambassador for war crimes issues, said that he “shouted out the news in a room with about 120 people and all broke into applause.”Ms. Pillay wasn’t the first Nobel laureate that the prize committees in Norway and Sweden have had trouble reaching immediately to share the news. Many weren’t even awake at the time.

It was around 1 a.m. in a “cheap hotel room in California” in 2024 when Geoffrey Hinton, a pioneer of research in artificial intelligence, got a call saying he was a winner of a Nobel Prize in Physics.

He did not know his work was even being considered for the honor. Was it a prank? Or could it be a dream?

“It is a million times more likely to be a dream than a reality,” Dr. Hinton thought.

Either way, one thing was certain: There was a Swedish-accented voice with life-changing news on the other end of the phone. “It was quite confusing,” Dr. Hinton said.

The surprise is by design. The winners of the Nobel Prizes remain a secret, even to the winners themselves, until hours or minutes before they are publicly announced.

“There’s no heads-up,” said Thomas Perlmann, the secretary-general of the Nobel Assembly, who makes what is always “an interesting phone call” to the winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Each of the six Nobel Prizes is managed by one of four institutions, which all enlist different callers. The only call that originates outside Sweden is the one made to the Nobel Peace Prize winner, who is selected by a five-person committee appointed by the Norwegian Parliament.

The unexpected calls are a last bit of secrecy to protect the process from outside influence, Dr. Perlmann said. But he acknowledged that it added to the “mystique” of it all. “These calls from Stockholm are quite famous,” Dr. Perlmann said. Yet those calls sometimes go unanswered.

Paul Milgrom, a professor at Stanford University who was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2021, had turned off his cellphone that night, as he does every night. So he found out when Robert B. Wilson, another Stanford economist and his neighbor, rang the doorbell at 2:15 a.m. The two men shared the prize.

“Paul? It’s Bob Wilson. You’ve won the Nobel Prize,” Mr. Wilson said in the moment, which was captured on doorbell camera footage. “And so they’re trying to reach you.”Mr. Milgrom had long brought Mr. Wilson oranges, apples and figs from his yard, but the news Mr. Wilson brought was even sweeter. “I was glad to share the moment with him,” Mr. Milgrom said.

Not everyone is happy to be notified in the middle of the night. Dr. Perlmann can think of at least one “incredibly angry” winner roused by his call.

“He became very friendly very fast,” Dr. Perlmann said. “We like to try to reach them before they find out any other way.”For Dr. Perlmann, the call window is the 90 minutes between when the formal decision and the official announcement are made.

One of last year’s winners in medicine, Fred Ramsdell, was off the grid in the Rocky Mountains and could not be reached before the public announcement. This year’s winners — Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel — were much easier to contact: Mr. Deisseroth is a night owl; the other two were in Germany.

“I got hold of all three,” Dr. Perlmann said. “An easy year, definitely.”Joel Mokyr won the Nobel in economic science last year but had been blocking calls from unknown numbers for much longer.

“I thought I had a better chance of being elected pope, and I’m Jewish,” Mr. Mokyr said.

Navi Pillay was at an annual conference of human rights lawyers and judges in Nuremberg, Germany, when she was suddenly led away on Friday morning local time, said Stephen Rapp, a former international prosecutor and U.S. ambassador for war crimes issues, who was there. When the news then broke, “I shouted out the news in a room with about 120 people and all broke into applause,” he said.

Navi Pillay, who won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, is a South African human rights lawyer who fought against the apartheid regime and who was formerly the United Nations’ top human rights official.

She was recognized “for her efforts to promote peace and international law,” the Norwegian Nobel Committee said in announcing the prize in Oslo.

Last year, a United Nations commission led by Ms. Pillay that was investigating the war in Gaza found that Israel had committed genocide against Palestinians, its most sweeping finding yet about the Israeli government’s conduct in the conflict. The Israeli government denounced the report.

The Nobel committee’s statement announcing Ms. Pillay as the winner included only a brief mention of her work on that investigation. Asked about it after the announcement, Jorgen Watne Frydnes, the committee’s chair, said her work on the commission was “an important part of the reasoning why she received the prize.”The U.N. human rights office welcomed the news.

“Particularly at this time, when human rights are under attack by so many, including so many in powerful positions, this award to Navi Pillay is a testament to how important and how relevant human rights are to everything we do,” said Ravina Shamdasani, spokeswoman for the U.N. human rights chief, Volker Turk.

“Navi Pillay remains an inspiration to millions globally, including her colleagues at the U.N. human rights office.”The Norwegian Nobel Committee said that the system of international law was under tremendous pressure and a shift toward “power politics” was coming at the expense of a global respect for law and justice.

“In awarding this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, the Norwegian Nobel Committee wants to remind the world that the rule of law – national and international – underpins the system we have set up to ensure peace and resolve conflicts non-violently,” the committee said in a statement. “Peace requires justice.”

The Norwegian Nobel Committee said that Pillay’s work “has significantly enlarged the scope and impact of international law.”Through international court cases, it added, “she has shown that legal measures can help prevent acts of war and violence.”The committee called Pillay “one of the most respected international jurists of our time.”

Pillay was born in Durban, South Africa, during apartheid, and her family is of Indian Tamil origin, the Norwegian Nobel Committee said. She became a lawyer and defended Nelson Mandela and others who confronted apartheid. A common thread runs through her work, the committee said, “confronting deep structural discrimination, segregation and exclusion.”

Jorgen Watne Frydnes, the chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, was asked at the event on Friday whether awarding the prize to Pillay was also a way to give the honor to the International Criminal Court, where she had served as a judge. “This is a message that international law and its institutions are the cornerstone of a more peaceful world,” Frydnes said. “So of course we hope that this prize also will strengthen the institutions, the individuals, not only Navi Pillay, but particularly her.”Jorgen Watne Frydnes, the chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, added that Pillay’s win was also “a message to those who are attacking” and undermining international law.

The U.N.’s human rights office welcomed the news that Pillay had won the award. “Particularly at this time, when human rights are under attack by so many, including so many in powerful positions, this award to Navi Pillay is a testament to how important and how relevant human rights are to everything we do,” said Ravina Shamdasani, spokeswoman for the U.N. human rights chief, Volker Turk. She added that “Navi Pillay remains an inspiration to millions globally, including her colleagues at the U.N. human rights office.”

The committee’s statement announcing Pillay as the winner of the award only includes a brief mention of her work on the United Nations commission’s investigation into the war in Gaza. Jorgen Watne Frydnes, the chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, was asked about that at the event on Friday. He said her work on the commission was an “an important part of the reasoning why she received the prize.”

The chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Jorgen Watne Frydnes, said Pillay had not yet been told that she had won the award. “My message to her would be if you see a Norwegian number calling, please pick up,” he said. “I would love to talk to you very soon.”

The Norwegian Nobel Committee, which organizes the prize, gave Pillay the prize “for her efforts to promote peace and international law.”The 2026 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Navanethem “Navi” Pillay, a South African human rights lawyer who fought against the apartheid regime.

Although the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize is set to be announced today, the prize is awarded each year in a separate ceremony. This year it will be held on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death.

This year, each Nobel Prize award comes with prize money of 12 million Swedish kronor, or about $1.2 million.

The 2025 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to María Corina Machado, the Venezuelan opposition leader, last October, but within months, she had presented her medal to President Trump.

It was one of many remarkable events in the year since Ms. Machado was honored. She had been in hiding in Venezuela when the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced her selection for her efforts to advance democracy “in the face of ever-expanding authoritarianism” in her country.

Two months after that announcement, Ms. Machado fled Venezuela in disguise, crossing military checkpoints and sailing to the island nation of Curaçao on a fishing skiff, before flying to Oslo, Norway, in an effort to collect her prize. But she arrived hours after the official ceremony, where her daughter collected her Nobel and delivered her prepared speech on her behalf.

At the time, the United States had spent months building up its military presence in the Caribbean after Mr. Trump secretly signed a directive to the Pentagon to use military force against Latin American drug cartels that he called terrorist organizations. Ms. Machado broadly supported the military buildup.

Then, on Jan. 3, U.S. commandos staged a remarkable raid in Caracas, Venezuela’s capital, and captured the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro. He was taken to Manhattan, where he was indicted on federal drug and weapons charges.

After the operation, Mr. Trump refused to support Ms. Machado, who had run a successful election campaign against Mr. Maduro in 2024, as leader of a new government, saying she lacked “respect” in Venezuela.

In mid-January, Ms. Machado, once a protégée of Washington’s Republican establishment, announced that she would present her Nobel Prize to Mr. Trump, who has long coveted the award. She said it would be an act of gratitude from the Venezuelan people for the removal of Mr. Maduro.

The Norwegian Nobel Institute, which administers the prize, said it could not be transferred. Nonetheless, a few days later, Ms. Machado handed over the Nobel medal, set behind a large gold frame, to Mr. Trump in a bizarre scene atthe White House. Mr. Trump said he was “honored” to finally receive the prize, and posed for photos with Ms. Machado in the Oval Office. In May, Ms. Machado said she planned to return to Venezuela by the end of the year.

On June 24, two violent earthquakes struck the country, killing thousands of people. Ms. Machado made a forceful bid to return to her country, telling the Trump administration and the Venezuelan people that she wanted to help with the recovery. But the Trump administration, which has in effect been running Venezuela, repeatedly rejected her requests, with some U.S. officials calling the move a “political stunt” and a distraction from recovery efforts. Ms. Machado has spent the last few months making public appearances across Europe and the Americas.

The recipients of the 2026 Nobel Prizes are being announced this week, including the Peace Prize on Friday.

Every October, committees in Sweden and Norway name Nobel laureates in a variety of prizes related to science, literature and economics, as well as peace work. Six prizes in total are awarded.

Laureates will receive their medals, prize money and diplomas in Stockholm and Oslo in December. Here is a quick guide to this year’s prizes. What are the Nobel Prizes?

Six Nobel Prizes are awarded every year, each recognizing an individual’s or an organization’s groundbreaking contribution in a specific field. Prizes are given for physiology or medicine, physics, chemistry, economic sciences, literature and peace work, the last of which often draws the most attention because of the fame of the people and groups nominated.

This year, there were 287 candidates for the Nobel Peace Prize — 208 individuals and 79 organizations, the Nobel committee said. Last year, the institute received 338 nominations. The highest number ever received was 376 candidates, in 2016. (Here’s how those nominations work.) Previous Nobel Peace Prize recipients include Kailash Satyarthi and Malala Yousafzai (2014); President Barack Obama (2009); Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk (1993); the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso (1989); and Mother Teresa (1979). When are the awards announced?

One prize will be announced each day this week, with one more on Oct. 12, between 5 a.m. and 7 a.m. Eastern time. Announcements are mainly made from Oslo and Stockholm and are streamed live on the official digital channels of the Nobel Prize organization.

The prize for physiology or medicine was awarded on Monday to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel for their discoveries in neuroscience.

The prize for physics was awarded on Tuesday to Francis Halzen for his discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin.

The prize for chemistry was awarded on Wednesday to Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai for solving a longstanding mystery about mirror images in molecules.

The prize for literature was awarded on Thursday to the Canadian poet and essayist Anne Carson “for her bold and inventive oeuvre.”

The award for peace work was awarded on Friday to Navi Pillay, a South African human rights lawyer. The Norwegian Nobel Committee said she “has been instrumental in ensuring that war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide are prosecuted.”What do the laureates receive?

Nobel Prize laureates receive a diploma, a medal and a document detailing the Nobel Prize amount, which this year is 12 million Swedish kronor, or about $1.2 million in current exchange rates. Who were last year’s recipients?

Among the notable winners last year were the scientists Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Dr. Shimon Sakaguchi, who were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries of peripheral immune tolerance — the system that explains how the immune system prevents rogue cells from attacking tissues and organs.

The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to María Corina Machado, a Venezuelan pro-democracy opposition leader who has been in hiding since 2024. Ms. Machado later gifted her medal to President Trump after he authorized a military raid to oust President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, who is awaiting trial on narco-terrorism, among other charges, in New York. The Norwegian Nobel Institute later issued a statement saying that the peace prize — which Mr. Trump has long coveted — was not transferable.

“A laureate cannot share the prize with others, nor transfer it once it has been announced,” the committee said. “A Nobel Peace Prize can also never be revoked. The decision is final and applies for all time.”See a complete list of 2025 winners here.