Leader: The Nobel Committee pits barbarism against civilization

This year's peace prize goes to South African human rights lawyer Navanethem "Navi" Pillay, the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced on Friday. The choice is explicitly justified by "her efforts to promote peace and international law". So a clear position for the so-called rule-based world order, which is now being dismantled at a rapid pace, when international institutions are attacked and more and more leaders rather want to promote the power of the strong.

In that situation, highlighting Pillay - with a CV as a judge in South Africa's Supreme Court, Rwanda's International Criminal Court, the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) - is a brave choice. Not least because last winter she directed sharp criticism against the US's actions in Venezuela and is also the chairperson of the International Commission against the Death Penalty (ICDP), which works to abolish the death penalty.

Perhaps not very controversial, according to some. But soon after the announcement, the White House imposed sanctions against the International Criminal Court. So in the times we live in, it just is what it is.

Pillay's deed is about maintaining decency - the foundation of civilization. And how fragile its existence is became frighteningly clear just the week before the Nobel committee's announcement.

These are exactly the kind of people who should be praised right now.

Only when death row inmate Christa Pike survived poison injections in Tennessee, to be treated in hospital today. Since it was announced that US President Donald Trump has approved Nidal Hasan to be arquebused later this year. And as if the death penalty and the procedure were not barbaric enough, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has decided that the execution will take place in public and live.

If so, it will be the first public execution in the United States since the 1930s, when crowds gathered to witness two people being hanged in Kentucky and Missouri, respectively. And in most countries, with a few brutal regimes as an exception, the idea of ​​using punishment as spectacle and public entertainment is just history.

But as Elisabeth Semel, who leads the law school on the death penalty at Berkeley in California, points out, the United States is led today by a president who is looking for spectacle. It is a deep contrast to Navi Pillay, who according to former foreign minister Jan Eliasson, who worked with her, stands for "integrity and courage" and is "very principled".

These are exactly the kind of people who should be praised right now. Not least as a way to show that there is plenty of decency left in civilization.

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