9.10.2026
Nobel Peace Prize winner Navi Pillay has dissed US President Donald Trump after she won the award for her efforts to promote peace and international law on Friday.
Navi Pillay a jurist from South Africa and a former UN high commissioner for human rights joked that she might “share the prize” with the US president if people kept applauding.
“If you clap a little bit more I may share this prize with Trump,’ Pillay said in a video posted to X by the Secretary General of Amnesty International which showed Pillay being applauded after the announcement of the award.
Mr. Trump has never hidden his desire to win the award, he pressured on the Norwegian committee to give him the award last year, but the award went Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado. She later gave the medal to President Trump in recognition of ‘his decisive support of our cause’ and gave him her Nobel medal shortly after Maduro was ousted in January of this year.
The gesture was largely symbolic, however, as the Nobel Committee has stated the honour itself cannot be transferred.
Pillay’s work ‘is a source of hope and inspiration to all those who seek to bring about a more peaceful world,’ said Jørgen Watne Frydnes, Chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, in announcing her win in Oslo, Norway, on Friday.
Her win is sure to be seen as a high-profile rebuke to Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who have both rejected the findings of a UN commission she led that Israel committed genocide in Gaza.
Both leaders also have been highly critical of the institutions where Pillay has worked.
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 recognised a scientist’s efforts to demystify a rare group of neutrinos.
The chemistry prize recognised 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 £910,000), whether for an individual, small group of laureates or organisation. Agency reports