What a terrific embarrassment. He kidnapped a head of state (Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, if you’ve forgotten), started a war that he can’t seem to finish, initiated a slick deal with a lunatic in the Kremlin to pave the way for cheaper diesel fuel for his people — and he didn’t win the Nobel peace prize? Shame on that traitorous gang in Norway for not recognising President Donald Trump’s obvious candidature!
Unlike the far better-equipped Fifa boss Gianno Infantino, the Nobel committee members clearly don’t know an obvious winner when they’re waving their little hands in front of their faces. The disgrace.
“The United States of America, represented by me as your president, should have received the Nobel peace prize, but didn’t,” said our man in Washington last week. Too right. “The Nobel peace prize has been forever discredited by a handful of radical ideologues who are anti-democracy and really enemies of civilisation. We will not forget, Norway,” intoned Trump.
Instead, some nobody called Navi Pillay has trotted off with the accolade. “I know a lot of people,” the president said. “I’ve never heard of this particular person. But congratulations anyway.” Now that’s what we call real peace-keeping magnanimity.
If we needed reminding as to why the 85-year-old human rights lawyer won the honour, the Nobel committee cited her role “as a driving force in the development of an international system of law and order”, while emphasising her “judicial rigour, personal integrity and considerable courage”.
It added: “At a time when the number of wars and conflicts is rising, and when judges and institutions of international law are under political attack, the Nobel committee wishes to issue a reminder that the ability to resolve conflicts without force or violence is dependent on the international rule of law. An international legal system in which war criminals are held toaccount and the victims of abuse see justice served is a precondition for a peaceful world.”
Really, it’s hard to pick a fight with that assessment. And, you know, it’s the peace prize, so picking fights is sort of the last thing on the qualification list.
Pillay seems to have been destined for a life of service to the law. According to an interview in the South African Yearbook of International Law, she testified in court as a five-year-old after being robbed of five pounds that her mother had given her. She fought an apartheid directive that forced her out of the University of Natal under the Extension of University Education Act, ultimately paving the way for her attendance at Harvard Law School, where she earned a doctorate in judicial science, the first South African to do so.
More recently she has served as a high court judge in South Africa and a judge of the International Criminal Court, chaired the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and a commission of inquiry on Palestine, and served as UN high commissioner for human rights. She’s now an ad hoc judge at the International Court of Justice on a genocide case involving Myanmar.
Undeserving indeed.
