South African champion of international law Navi Pillay, who was awarded this year’s Nobel peace prize, joked that she might “share the prize” with US President Donald Trump if people kept applauding her.
“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 in Nuremberg after the announcement of the award.
She said that her first reaction to hearing the news was that it must be a joke.
“Being a lawyer and a judge, I still want to verify this,” the 85-year-old said, wanting to make sure it was true.
Pillay mentioned her work heading the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry (COI), which does not speak on behalf of the world body, and which last year found that genocide was occurring in Gaza.
“The last thing I did is the delivery of the report on Gaza, naming what’s happening there as genocide,” she said.
“One of the main reactions to that report is paying tribute to me for my courage. And you can imagine how surprised I was, why would you need courage to speak the truth?” she added.
The prize comes with a gold medal, a diploma and a prize sum of $1.2 million.
The award will be presented at a formal ceremony in Oslo on December 10, the anniversary of the 1896 death of the prizes’ creator, Swedish inventor and philanthropist Alfred Nobel.
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