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The Nobel Peace Prize for 2026 was awarded Friday to Navanethem “Navi” Pillay, a South African human rights champion and judge on the International Criminal Court.
The South African-born former United Nations human rights chief, who is 85 years old, was recognized for her efforts to promote peace and international law, said Jørgen Watne Frydnes, chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee.
Frydnes said the committee had been unable to reach Pillay to tell her she had been awarded the prize, saying from the podium that if she was watching, and saw a call coming in from a Norwegian phone number, “please pick up.”
The award is often considered the most prestigious honor on the planet. This year marks the 125th anniversary of the peace prize.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee had received nominations this year for 287 candidates for this year’s prize, and just over a quarter of them were organizations.
Last year, Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado won the Nobel Peace Prize for her struggle to achieve a democratic transition in the South American nation, winning recognition as a woman “who keeps the flame of democracy burning amid a growing darkness.”
Machado gave President Trump, who has long said he deserves the prize, her Nobel medal shortly after the United States ousted then-President Nicolás Maduro. But it was largely a symbolic gesture: The Nobel Committee has said the honor itself cannot be transferred.
Nominations can be made by a select group of people and organizations, including heads of state or politicians serving at a national level, university professors, directors of foreign policy institutes, past Nobel Prize recipients and members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee itself.
Four of this year’s Nobels were announced earlier this week. The Nobel for medicine went to three scientists whose work led to a tool that uses light to help unravel how the brain works. The physics award recognized a scientist’s efforts to demystify a rare group of neutrinos. The chemistry prize recognized two scientists for untangling mysterious mirror images in molecules, a discovery that has been used to develop countless drugs.
Canadian poet, essayist and translator Anne Carson won the literature prize Thursday for “bold and inventive” works that fuse the classical and the modern and blur the boundaries of poetry and prose.
The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences will be announced Monday.
The prize money this year is 12 million Swedish kronor (about $1.2 million), whether for an individual, small group of laureates or organization.
This year marks the 125th anniversary of the peace prize, which so far has gone to 112 individuals and 28 separate institutions since its inception in 1901. The Red Cross has won three times and the U.N. refugee agency twice.
Just 20 of the 112 individual laureates have been women, but eight of those women received the prize in the past 15 years.
Education activist Malala Yousafzai is the youngest laureate; she won at 17 in 2014.
The United States is the most-credited country, with 24 awards naming U.S. institutions or individuals, ahead of the United Kingdom (13) and Switzerland (11). Yet no laureate listed as American has won since U.S. President Barack Obama was awarded in 2009.
The prize has gone unawarded on 19 occasions, most of them during the world wars. In 1948, the year Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated, no prize was awarded; he had been nominated 12 times and never won.
In 1939, a Swedish member of parliament nominated Adolf Hitler, then withdrew the nomination, saying it was never meant seriously.
