Navi Pillay’s Nobel Peace Prize is a victory for the power of human rights law

Navi Pillay grew up under laws designed to deny her equality. Born into a Tamil family in apartheid South Africa, she knew that injustice could be written into a statute and defended from a judge’s bench. She devoted her career to proving the law could be a force for justice instead making legal equality into lived equality.

Today, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has awarded her the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts to promote peace and international law. It recognises a career spanning the struggle against apartheid, international criminal justice and her service as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. Throughout, Navi has demonstrated an unwavering belief in the power of international law and the institutions created to uphold it, not as abstract ideals, but as essential protections against abuse, persecution and impunity.

For us at Equality Now, this is a moment of immense pride. Navi co-founded our organisation in 1992 with Jessica Neuwirth and Feryal Gharahi. Together, they challenged a deeply entrenched hierarchy: violence and discrimination against women were human rights violations, not private matters or cultural practices beyond the reach of justice. Governments had a duty to deliver gender equality under the law.

Over her lifetime, Navi has defended justice across the world. She helped secure a landmark legal breakthrough as a judge at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda where she was instrumental in the Akayesu judgement establishing that rape could constitute genocide. It transformed the recognition of sexual violence in international law, acknowledging its deliberate use in the destruction of a people.

Navi’s career is a testament to what these legal mechanisms can achieve when they are respected, utilised and given the authority to act.

That conviction runs through the work of Equality Now. We are global because injustice is global, and we share Navi’s determination to confront it wherever it exists. We use international law to help reform discriminatory laws and turn legal commitments into lived reality. In Africa, as Secretariat of the SOAWR Coalition, we support women to use the Maputo Protocol, one of the world’s most progressive women’s rights treaties, to demand equality and protection. Around the world, we work with partners to strengthen laws on sexual violence, expand access to survivor-centred justice, end child marriage and challenge systemic discrimination. In every region, the principle is the same: justice must reach those whom power, prejudice and politics too often leave behind. 

The Nobel Committee’s announcement comes at a critical moment. International human rights institutions, courts, and the principles they uphold are under growing attack. We cannot forget why they exist. They were built from humanity’s darkest lessons knowing what happens when power goes unchecked and human dignity becomes expendable. They exist not only to reckon with the past, but to stop us from repeating it. 

That conviction remains at the heart of Equality Now. Since Navi helped found us, we and our partners have helped reform more than 140 discriminatory laws around the world. But Navi’s example reminds us that changing the law is never the end of the work. Justice only becomes real when the law reaches the people it was meant to protect. Her Nobel Peace Prize is an affirmation of their enduring importance, and of the people who devote their lives to making them work.

At Equality Now, defending international human rights law and enforcement mechanisms is central to our work. Alongside partners worldwide, we are challenging attempts to weaken human rights protections, strengthening accountability through UN and regional mechanisms, and working to ensure that international legal obligations and commitments become a reality and provide justice in people’s lives. We share Navi’s conviction that international law must be more than a promise on paper. It must be upheld, defended and made real for the people who depend upon it.

From confronting the injustices of apartheid to helping establish new standards of international accountability, Navi has shown what becomes possible when we refuse to accept that power should prevail over principle. I celebrate Navi today not only with immense pride, but with gratitude. To lead an organisation she helped build is to inherit both an extraordinary gift and a responsibility: to keep asking whether the law is serving those with the least power, and to keep challenging it when it does not.

Her Nobel Peace Prize honours a lifetime of making justice possible. It also reminds us that the institutions she has helped shape are worth defending because the people they exist to protect are worth defending. Every one of us.

The honour is hers. The responsibility to uphold what she stands for belongs to us all.