A most ignoble Nobel Peace Prize
by Clifford D. May · The Washington TimesOPINION:
The Norwegian worthies who serve on the Nobel committee have demonstrated dubious judgment in the past.
In 1994, they gave Yasser Arafat a share of the Nobel 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, the committee gave its gold medal to President Obama “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”
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The prize was awarded 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, Mr. Ahmed 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 past 30 years of her career.
In 1995, Ms. Pillay was elected by the U.N. General Assembly to serve as a judge on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and she was its president from 1999 to 2003. More on that in a moment.
From 2003 to 2008, she was a judge on the International Criminal Court, whose first trial did not 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.
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In 2008, Ms. Pillay became United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. According to a 2011 study by the Geneva-based U.N. 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.
Ms. Pillay’s sins of omission were accompanied by sins of commission. In 2013, Emma Reilly, a human rights lawyer who worked under Ms. Pillay, reported that staffers 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 of them, 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, Ms. Reilly said, all U.N. 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.”
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In 2010, despite the urgings of dozens of nongovernmental organizations, Ms. Pillay declined to attend the Nobel ceremony for the recipient, Liu Xiaobo, who was then imprisoned in China. Mr. Liu died in state custody seven years later.
Allegations of Ms. Pillay’s hostility toward Israel are numerous and long-standing. In 2010, U.N. 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.”
The request was refused.
From 2021 to 2025, Ms. Pillay 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.
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Unlike other U.N. inquiries, the COI was given no end date — a perpetual show trial.
In that position, according to the Anti-Defamation League, 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 the Gaza Strip’s Palestinians, not to destroy Hamas, which had just murdered more than 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 World Health Organization could vaccinate Gaza children against polio.
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Does that sound like what the Nazis did to Jews in Europe or what 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.
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So what about Hamas’ well-documented and numerous cases of sexual violence? In its first post-Oct. 7, 2023, report, U.N. 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 Zelenskyy, who is defending Ukraine against Vladimir Putin’s neo-imperialist war.
Instead, they chose a lawyer whose U.N. 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’ applause.
When Hamas gives you its approval, peace is not what you are promoting.
• Clifford D. May is founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a columnist for The Washington Times and host of the “Foreign Podicy” podcast.
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