An implicit rebuke

Trump fails to win Nobel Peace Prize again.

In awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Navi Pillay, a leading international lawyer and judge, the Nobel Committee has affirmed the importance of international law at a moment when it is under threat, in what amounts to an implicit rebuke of President Trump and other world leaders who are increasingly hostile to that system.

“In awarding this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, the Norwegian Nobel Committee wants to remind the world that the rule of law — national and international — underpins the system we have set up to ensure peace and resolve conflicts nonviolently,” the committee said in its prize announcement on Friday. But today, it continued, the judges on international courts who “guard the thin red line between order and chaos” are “sanctioned, and their institutions are attacked.”

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At a brief news conference in Nuremberg, Germany, Navi Pillay said she dedicated her award to “the survivors of international crimes and to the defenders of international justice.” She mused that “perhaps it was meant to be” that she received the news in a city whose famous post-war trials of Nazi leaders were foundational to creating the modern international justice system. But she offered a warning, too, saying that efforts to undermine the system “risk returning us to a world in which power rather than law determines whose suffering matters.”

Trump is seeking his revenge.

Hours after the prize was awarded, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced new sanctions on the International Criminal Court. “We will ban transactions with this rogue court, cutting off their resources and crippling its ability to operate,” he said in a statement.

The U.N. secretary general, António Guterres, condemned the action, calling it a “serious blow to our collective pursuit of international criminal justice, of which the I.C.C. is a key pillar.” Earlier Friday, he praised the Nobel committee for awarding the Peace Prize to Pillay, a former I.C.C. judge. Guterres’s dual statements captured the challenges he has faced in dealing with the United States, once regarded as the pillar of international order and law.

But now just a playpen for the worst human on the planet.

One of Navi Pillay’s contributions to international law is her pioneering work on the gravity of sexual violence during conflict. As a judge on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, she pushed from the bench to define the rape of women and children as a weapon of war instead of “collateral damage.” In 1998, when that tribunal found a former Rwandan mayor guilty of genocide, it was the first time that rape had been defined as part of genocide. Sexual violence has since been integrated in international law as a potential war crime, a crime against humanity or an act of genocide.

Women are, after all, human.