A most ignoble Nobel Peace Prize

The Norwegian worthies who serve on the Nobel Prize Committee have demonstrated dubious judgment in the past. For example, in 1994, they gave Yasser Arafat a share of the Peace Prize for his “efforts to create peace in the Middle East.” Six years later he walked away from the Camp David talks and the second intifada followed. In 2009, they gave their gold medal to Barack Obama “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.” The prize came less than nine months into his presidency, when even ardent admirers would have been hard-pressed to cite achievements. In 2019 the committee honored Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed for his peace initiative with Eritrea. About a year later he sent troops into Tigray, alongside Eritrean forces, to wage a war in which as many as 600,000 people died from violence, starvation, and disease. This year, however, the committee sank below the dimmest expectations of its critics by giving the prize to Navanethem “Navi” Pillay “for her efforts to promote peace and international law.” Really? Let’s review the last 30 years of her career. In 1995, she was one of the first six judges on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), and she was its president from 1999 to 2003. More on that in a moment. She was a judge on the International Criminal Court from 2003 to 2008 whose first trial didn’t start until January 2009. When the court did get moving, it “fast became a vehicle for transnational bureaucrats to accuse the U.S. and Israel of imagined crimes,” as the Wall Street Journal noted. In 2008, Ms. Pillay became UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. According to a 2011 study by the Geneva-based UN Watch, she spent the next couple of years turning “a blind eye to most of the world’s worst abusers,” including Cuba, North Korea, Eritrea, Sudan, and Belarus. Her sins of omission were accompanied by sins of commission. In 2013, Emma Reilly, a human rights lawyer who worked under Ms. Pillay, reported that staff were instructed to give Chinese officials information on individuals planning to speak out about Beijing’s human rights abuses. She says the list grew to more than 50 Uyghur, Tibetan, Hong Kong, and Chinese dissidents. Some, she said, later “testified under oath to their family members being intimidated, arbitrarily detained, tortured, disappeared, and even killed in concentration camps.” Ms. Reilly’s whistleblower protection, she told me, proved to be “absolutely meaningless.” In the end, all UN staffers “who directly handed over names were promoted. I was fired for speaking up.” On X last week Ms. Reilly put it bluntly: Ms. Pillay was “quite literally complicit in the Uyghur genocide.” In 2010, despite the urgings of dozens of NGOs, Ms. Pillay declined to attend the Nobel ceremony for recipient Liu Xiaobo, then imprisoned in China. Mr. Liu died in state custody seven years later. Allegations of Ms. Pillay’s hostility toward Israel are numerous and longstanding. In 2010, UN Watch sent Ms. Pillay a letter demanding that her office stop publishing a Libyan-linked organization’s false charges that “Israeli doctors stole Palestinian organs and that ‘Jews everywhere’ were complicit in a Holocaust against Palestinians.” This request was refused. From 2021 to 2025, she chaired the tendentiously named “Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel.” Abbreviated as the COI, it was sponsored by Pakistan on behalf of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, a 57-member bloc of Muslim-dominated states. Unlike other inquiries, it was given no end date: a perpetual show trial. In that position, according to the ADL, she “mainstreamed anti-Zionist antisemitism inside the UN.” In 2025, her COI issued a report claiming Israel had committed genocide in Gaza. That required concluding that the only reasonable explanation for Israel’s conduct was an intent to destroy Gaza’s Palestinians – not to destroy Hamas, which had just murdered 1,200 men, women, children, and infants, and had taken 251 hostages. As the war progressed, Israel allowed tons of food and other aid into Gaza and agreed to pauses in the fighting so the WHO could vaccinate Gazan children against polio. Does that sound like what the Nazis did to Jews Europe or the Hutu extremists did to Rwandan Tutsis? At any point, Hamas could have surrendered – or merely agreed to release all the hostages and accept a ceasefire. Does anyone seriously believe Israel would not have agreed? In fact, one year ago this week, Israel’s cabinet approved a U.S.-brokered agreement that entailed Israeli forces halting offensive operations and withdrawing to agreed lines. Three days later, Hamas released the last 20 living hostages. One more point: As a judge on the ICTR, Ms. Pillay co-authored the landmark 1998 international ruling recognizing rape and sexual violence as constituent acts of genocide and crimes against humanity, rather than just an unregulated byproduct of war. What about Hamas’s well-documented and numerous cases of sexual violence? In its first post-Oct. 7 report, UN Watch’s legal adviser, Dina Rovner, noted that while the COI acknowledged those atrocities, it was reluctant to attribute them to Hamas policy or classify them as crimes against humanity. The Norwegian worthies must have known all this. They could have honored Jimmy Lai, the Hong Kong champion of free speech imprisoned by Beijing, or Volodymyr Zelensky, who is defending Ukraine against Vladimir Putin’s neo-imperialist war. Instead, they chose a lawyer whose UN office, a whistleblower says, gave Beijing the names of Uyghurs protesting a real genocide, and whose libelous genocide finding against Israel last week received Hamas’s applause. When Hamas gives you its approval, peace is not what you’re promoting. Clifford D. May is founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a columnist for The Washington Times, and host of the “Foreign Podicy” podcast.