By S. Ratnajeevan H. Hoole –

The 2026 Nobel Peace Prize winner is Navaneetham (aka Navi) Pillay for her efforts to promote peace, international law, and human rights. She is a South African jurist born into a family of Indian Tamil origin.

As India Today (9 Oct. 2026) notes, she is a South African jurist born into a family of Indian Tamil origin. Hers was a simple family with the father being a Durban Bus Driver. She overcame much, having once been banned from the chambers of South African judges because of her skin color.

For the young, she is a most appropriate role model – very much unlike US President Donald Trump. She is a former Head of the UN Human Rights Commission and many other things.

UN Secretary General António Guterres says Navi Pillay has been “a steadfast, independent voice of justice amidst some of the most historic international legal cases of our time”.

He lists examples including defending Nelson Mandela and others against the Apartheid regime, working on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda amid the 1994 genocide, and her role chairing the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

Guterres says that Pillay has shown “the force of law must prevail over the law of force” in her work and says Pillay has shown “defending human rights is the surest safeguard against injustice”.

Ironically – indeed shamelessly — President Donald Trump canvassed for the Nobel Peace Prize for himself. The Nobel Prize can be shared by the Nobel Committee with up to three people at the time of award but cannot be after its award – the money (set at 12 million Kroners in Swedish currency equivalent to about US$1.2 million – of course can be given away by the awardee but that does not make the one getting the money a Nobel Laureate.

How can a war-monger ever even be contemplated for the Nobel Peace Prize?

The Nobel Committee in a slap on Trump’s face awarded the prize to Navi Pillay. The US now threatens the international legal system arguing that Americans cannot be prosecuted by outside bodies, because America is not a signatory to the Rome Treaty and therefore does not come under the International Criminal Court –  just as Barrack Obama always prefaced his reports on his miitary operations saying no American lives were lost, exposing the racism inherent to the Americn systen, now more forcefully brought out by Trump.

Alfred Arulanandam. CPA, at Global Management Consultants in Mississauga, Ont, announced to the Tamil Community, “Proud to be a Tamil Always – Navi Pillay Wins the Nobel Peace Prize.”  She is the fourth in a line of Tamils to be recognized by the Nobel Committee for their significant contributions to humanity.

Out of 9 Indians (11 if the Dalai Lama and Mother Theresa are counted as some do), 4 are of Tamil ethnicity. It is a huge achievement that naturally makes those like Alfred Arulanandam proud. The first Indian to win a Nobel Prize was Rabindranath Tagore (1913, Literature).

Hanif Vally is the Chief Executive of South Africa’s Foundation for Human Rights and played a major role in the Truth and Reconcilation Commission there, often cross-examining those with whom he had been incarcerated. He has worked closely with Navaneetham Pillay. He is proud of her work. As Africa’s Mail and Guardian (5 Dec. 1997) puts it, Vally’s political teeth were cut in the black consciousness tradition, and he served as president of the Black Students’ Society in the Seventies. Never one for the politics of ethnicity, he disagreed with members of the Transvaal Indian Congress. It is ironic then that this long-time player in the politics of black consciousness should have been the frontline defender of the truth commission when Ntsiki Biko, the widow of Steve Biko – the father of black consciousness – challenged the commission.

One can understand their anger – anger at their loss and the lack of punishment – but amnesty is a compromise. It is a foundation stone of our democracy that there will be no impunity.

No wonder that the Sinhalese were upset by the 2011 UN Panel of Experts report on Sri Lanka. The word Tamil seems to set off the Sinhalese. Theycondemned that Darusman Report without seeing it. The three-member panel consisted of Marzuki Darusman (Indonesia) – Chair, Yasmin Sooka (South Africa) and Steven Ratner (United States). They found credible reports of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by both the Sri Lankan government forces and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) during the final stages of the civil war in 2009.

Yasmin Sooka of South Indian origin was raised in South Africa. She is ethnically a Tamil as reflected by her father’s distinctly Tamil name, Narayanaswamy Rathinasamy. Her surname Sooka is from her Gujarati husband settled in South Africa. She shares much in heritage with Navi Pillay.

Her Tamilness raised Sinhalese hackles. The communalist thinking which seems to affect even the NPP government is that, what a Tamil says about Sinhalese guilt in war crimes or genocide cannot be trusted but what the Sinhalese themselves say is Gospel Truth. This is why we need an international inquiry against Sri Lanka.

Well before the Darusman Report was released, the Bar Association condemned the report, presumably having seen the copy sent to the Sri Lankan government for observations. Those were dangerous times for Tamils including Tamil legal stalwarts. The Darusman report was condemned unanimously by the Bar Association without seeing the report. I reported that Neelakandan voted for the Bar Association’s resolution condemning the UN Report and Sivapalan testified at the LLRC against the LTTE (Hoole, “Do not take the Tamils to be fools,” (The Sunday Leader, 31 July 2011). My condemnation of the Bar Association’s criticism (“Complaints against the Ban Ki Moon Panel,” Daily Mirror, 4 June, 2011) seems to have been censored in the archives of the Daily Mirror.

At the time, I was on the board of the Noolaham archives and I wrote about how the army barged into our meeting in Jaffna. My article appeared in many places. The Noolaham Board panicked that my complaint would be used to punish Noolaham. Since then I seem to have been removed from the Board. Such is the bravado of Tamil leaders.

We Tamils live in Sri Lanka where we do not know when communalist laws will be activated like Damocle’s Sword or even the press censorship laws will be invoked to imprison us because someone claimed in  a police complaint that he or she was offended. These horrible laws to entrap minorities must go, not smuggled in again through bogus ongoing revisions.

In her 2013 Aug. Press Conference in Colombo, Navi Pillay stated that Ministers and commentators repeatedly invoked her ancestry. In Colombo, Pillay said that for several years “media, ministers, bloggers and various propagandists” in Sri Lanka had, “on the basis of my Indian Tamil heritage”, described her as a tool of the LTTE, in their pay and the “Tamil Tigress in the UN”. This was “not only wildly incorrect, it is deeply offensive”, she said, adding that at least three ministers had joined in [the chorus] during the week of her visit.

“Firstly, let me say, I am a South African and proud of it,” she said. She went on to note that her only previous visit to Sri Lanka had been to attend a commemoration of Neelan Tiruchelvam, who was killed in 1999.

The NPP governmnt is moving in the right direction charging many criminals. Yet there are others who say the exercise is to eliminate Sinhalese politicians who can mount a challenge at the next elections. The true intention of the government would be laid bare only when they charge Sinhalese war criminals who killed Tamils. To get Tamil votes, the NPP must move decisively and definitively against the military people who killed innocent civilians. Will it?

As for Trump’s threats against the ICC, banks seem reluctant to give money to the ICC and the Nobel Committee. Marco Rubio the American Secretary of State is going gung-ho amplifying these threats about prosecuting Americans. The world fears trumps who carries the nuclear codes with him.

Reed Brody trashed the idea that Americans can be prosecuted only by the US and not the ICC. Brody is a Hungarian-American human rights lawyer and former prosecutor. He served as counsel and spokesperson for Human Rights Watch (1998–2016), director of the International Commission of Jurists’ Centre for the Independence of Judges and Lawyers, and worked with the UN in El Salvador and the Democratic Republic of Congo. His experience covers

1. Lead Counsel for the victims of Chad’s former dictator, Hissène Habré, leading to his historic 2016 conviction for crimes against humanity in a hybrid tribunal in Senegal.

2. Getting Chilean Dictator Augusto Pinochet arrested in London in 1998.

3. Worked with victims seeking justice against Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier (Haiti), Yahya Jammeh (Gambia), and on investigations regarding Nicaragua and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

His  book To Catch a Dictator: The Pursuit and Trial of Hissène Habré (2022) has earned him the nickname in the media as “Dictator Hunter.”

As the Toronto Star commented (4 Nov. 2013), “Victors, as always, write the requiems. […] It was ‘a war without witnesses.’ Colombo made sure of that.”

However, the Tronto Star is wrong. There is planty of other evidence of Sri lankan complicity in war crimes. It is based on it that Canada and the UK have senctioned Mahinda and Gotbaya Rajapaksa and many military people. Navi Pillay in her visit to Colombo, as the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, in September 2013, called upon Sri Lanka again to conduct a credible inquiry into human rights violations. Failing that, “the international community will have a duty to establish its own inquiry mechanisms.”

Thirteen years since Navi Pillay’s demand, we are still waiting. It takes only a country like Canada or the UK that is a signatory to the Rome Statute to hand over its prosecutorial rights to the iCC when our war criminals go there. To let Sri Lanka and its war criminals off is to invite expanding impunity to war crimes and genocide.