Navi Pillay Awarded Nobel Peace Prize for Lifetime of Fighting for Human Rights

[Anchor]

This year's Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay of South Africa. She was recognized for her decisive role in the international community in punishing anti-humanitarian crimes such as war and genocide.

Correspondent Kwon Yeongin reports from Paris.

[Reporter]

The Nobel Committee's choice for this year's Nobel Peace Prize was 85-year-old jurist and former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay.

[Jørgen Watne Frydnes / Chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee: The laureate of the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize is Navi Pillay!]

The committee explained its reasons for the selection, stating that Pillay has played a decisive role in prosecuting war crimes, crimes against humanity, and the crime of genocide.

[Jørgen Watne Frydnes / Chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee: This year's laureate has played a central role in ensuring that war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide are prosecuted.]

Coming from an Indian immigrant family in South Africa, Pillay began her career as a lawyer fighting against apartheid by defending Nelson Mandela.

As the first non-white female judge on the High Court of South Africa, Pillay subsequently expanded her stage of activity to the international community.

As a judge on the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, she established the legal precedent allowing systematic sexual violence against women during the 1994 Rwandan civil war to be punished as a war crime.

Serving as the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights for six years starting in 2008, she played a role in the establishment of the UN Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

More recently, as chair of a UN commission of inquiry, she defined Israel's military operations in the Gaza Strip as genocide and condemned them.

[Navi Pillay / Nobel Peace Prize Laureate (last year): The ongoing genocide in Gaza is morally unacceptable. Urgent legal action is required.]

South Korean citizens who safeguarded democracy against the December 3 emergency martial law were also nominated for this year's Nobel Peace Prize, but it did not lead to an award, and U.S. President Donald Trump, who had claimed he was deserving of the prize, was not called.

The 107th Nobel Peace Prize ceremony will take place on December 10 in Oslo, Norway.

(Video editing: Jung Yong-hwa)
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.