LGBT Radical Wins Nobel Prize

By | 2026

WASHINGTON, D.C. November 6 (C-Fam) The 2026 winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, announced last month, is the former UN human rights chief who did the most to embed issues of sexual orientation and gender identity in the work of her office, despite the fact that they remained controversial in the General Assembly and other negotiating bodies within the UN.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee named Navanethem “Navi” Pillay as the Nobel laureate, with a focus on her prosecution of war crimes and genocide as a judge on the International Court of Justice.  However, in her earlier job as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, she received a different honor in 2014, being awarded “LGBTI Friend of the Year” by ILGA World.

“During my mandate as High Commissioner, the United Nations has gone from being mostly silent, to openly advocating measures to combat discrimination and violence against LGBTI persons,” said Pillay upon receiving the recognition. “My Office played an important part in this transformation.”

In addition to promoting nondiscrimination efforts, Pillay’s office urged governments to decriminalize homosexual behavior, promoted social acceptance of LGBT issues, and the legal recognition of gender identity and same-sex unions.

Pillay began her career as an attorney in South Africa.  During her tenure as High Commissioner, which lasted from 2008-2014, she presented the UN’s first report on discriminatory laws and practices on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, led the first formal multilateral debate on the rights of people who identify as LGBT at the Human Rights Council, and, in 2013, launched the “Free & Equal” platform to promote LGBT acceptance through public information campaigns.

“Free & Equal” drew notoriety when it published an image of Mother Teresa urging people to “go home and love your family” as part of its observation of the International Day of Families in 2014. Unlike the Catholic saint, who promoted the traditional Christian understanding of the family, the “Free & Equal” campaign used the day to promote “diverse forms” of the family, including those based around same-sex relationships.

In 2013, when asked by the Friday Fax who funded her office’s work on LGBT issues, Pillay cited Nordic countries.

Under Pillay’s leadership, the UN’s human rights office also took a more aggressive stance on abortion.  In 2011, she framed the denial or restriction of abortion as a human rights violation.  She also oversaw the preparation of a reproductive rights handbook, published in 2015, in collaboration with the United Nations Population Fund and the Danish Institute for Human Rights.  It contains a compilation of human rights experts’ recommendations, including those urging the decriminalization of abortion.

“I addressed many issues not addressed by the UN before, one being geographical representation of staff, the others are LGBTI rights were recognized for the first time,” said Pillay in 2022 as she received an honorary doctorate from a university in Johannesburg.

This recognition may have occurred within Pillay’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, but these issues remained blocked due to lack of consensus in the General Assembly and were not included in any hard law human rights treaties.

Nevertheless, Pillay’s successors have continued to elevate LGBT issues in the UN human rights system, continuing the “Free & Equal” platform and pressuring countries to liberalize their laws and promote the redefinition of the family and the acceptance of gender ideology, as well as the promotion of abortion as a right.

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