The committee said awarding the prize to Pillay, who has served as a judge on several international courts, including the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, underlined the importance of maintaining an international legal order.
The Hague-based ICC has long been a target of US President Donald Trump, whose campaign against the court escalated after it issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister in 2024, the Reuters news agency reported.
"The system of international law is under tremendous pressure, and its institutions are under attack," the Nobel committee said in its citation.
"We see a shift towards power politics at the expense of legal frameworks and global respect for law and justice. Whenever might overtakes right, it undermines stability, trust and peaceful co-existence," it added.
Pillay, 85, also chaired the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, which concluded last year that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza, Reuters reported.
Israel rejected the finding.
Pillay received news of the award while attending a legal conference in Nuremberg, Germany, where the first international criminal tribunal was established in the mid-1940s to prosecute Nazi crimes.
She warned on Friday that mounting political attacks on international law risked returning the world to a system in which "power rather than law determines whose suffering matters," Reuters reported.
"This award strengthens my conviction that we must stand together in defence of the rule of law, in defence of independent courts, and an international legal order based on principle," Pillay said in a statement in Nuremberg after learning that she had won the prize.
Pillay is currently a judge at the International Court of Justice, where she is involved in a genocide case against Myanmar, the citation said.
The award, worth 12 million Swedish kronor, or about USD 1.2 million, will be presented in Oslo on December 10.
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Source: Reuters, IAR/PAP