Yesterday, Americans learned that their government plans to broadcast a killing.

The Pentagon said Thursday that the December execution of Nidal Hasan, convicted of murdering 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009, would be livestreamed. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had vowed to make the execution public. The proposed spectacle would bring a firing squad into homes and onto phones across the country.

Today, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded its Peace Prize to Navanethem “Navi” Pillay, whose career has been devoted to making governments and individuals answerable to international law.

The contrast is jarring. One announcement invites the public to watch the state demonstrate its power over a human life; the other honors a woman who has spent her career insisting that power itself must answer to law.

Public executions in the United States belong to a past exemplified by the hanging of Rainey Bethea in Kentucky in 1936 and Roscoe Jackson in Missouri in 1937. Both preceded the devastation of World War II, which made clear the critical role of the rule of law, paved the way for the creation of the United Nations, and laid the foundations for the development of modern international justice. Bringing public execution into the digital age should force Americans to consider what exactly their government is reviving.

Let’s be clear: the Fort Hood killings were horrific. In November 2009, Hasan, an Army major and psychiatrist with more than two decades of military service, opened fire on unarmed soldiers at the Texas military base, killing 10 men and three women, one of whom was pregnant at the time. His crimes were as brutal as they were cowardly, and the victims, survivors, and their families deserve justice.

But their suffering does not require the government to turn punishment into a public spectacle.

Even a person convicted of mass murder remains entitled to humane treatment. And respecting that obligation does not diminish the victims’ suffering.

The postwar legal order emerged from an understanding that states could commit atrocities while invoking authority, obedience, and national purpose. The UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights asserted that human dignity imposed obligations beyond whatever a government chose to permit.

That order was never complete or consistently applied. The United States retained capital punishment. Colonial domination persisted. Governments that helped articulate universal rights continued to deny them to people under their own authority.

Yet the principles mattered; they gave those excluded from protection a language with which to demand it, and helped establish institutions through which abuses could be judged. Their universality meant that governments could be measured against their promises, including when doing so was inconvenient to the powerful.

Raised under apartheid in South Africa, Pillay confronted a system in which racial subordination was embedded in law. She defended opponents of apartheid and went on to serve on South Africa’s High Court, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the International Criminal Court, and as UN high commissioner for human rights.

At the Rwanda tribunal, Pillay sat on the panel that decided the 1998 case against Jean-Paul Akayesu, establishing that rape and sexual violence could constitute genocide when committed with the requisite intent. The judgment established that sexual violence could be a means of destroying a protected group, rather than treating it as incidental to the killing.

The tribunal ultimately sentenced Akayesu to life imprisonment. It confronted crimes of extraordinary brutality through evidence, adjudication and punishment bounded by its legal mandate. That history offers a rebuttal to the suggestion that the gravity of a crime requires the state to abandon restraint.

Today, the institutions carrying forward that work face direct attack.

The Trump administration renewed its sanctions campaign against the ICC in February 2025, initially targeting prosecutor Karim Khan and subsequently other court officials. Today, it expanded that campaign to the court itself. The administration presents its actions as a defense of American sovereignty, citing what Secretary of State Marco Rubio called bipartisan agreement that the US is not subject to ICC jurisdiction.

Disputes about jurisdiction and judicial decisions deserve serious legal scrutiny. And there is one here: the US helped negotiate the Rome Statute but has never been a party to it, while the court holds that it may try nonparty nationals for crimes committed on the territory of states parties. The statute gives even nonparty states ways to press that objection: they can ask the prosecutor to defer to their own investigations or challenge a case’s admissibility before the judges, and the UN Security Council can halt investigations for renewable one-year periods, as it did for peacekeepers at US insistence in 2002. The administration has chosen instead to punish the court.

Using economic power to disable a court is an assault on the conditions that allow independent adjudication. It places pressure on judges to consider the personal and institutional costs of decisions that powerful governments oppose.

A public execution and sanctions against an international court are different acts with different legal questions. But taken together they reveal an unnerving national trajectory: a government celebrating its authority to punish while seeking to weaken an institution that might hold its own conduct, or that of its shrinking list of allies, to account.

It is easy to look at these developments and conclude that international justice is losing ground.

Pillay’s receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize offers reason to keep working.

Her career spans apartheid, genocide and the persistent failures of international protection. She has worked where faith in justice would have been hardest to sustain. The achievements for which she is being honored required people to keep building legal protections after those protections had failed, or worse, where they had not existed in the first place.

Governments must defend judicial independence and ensure that international courts can function. Legal professionals must insist on evidence, due process and equal accountability. Universities and newsrooms must help people understand why these safeguards matter, especially when the people invoking them are unpopular or politically inconvenient.

For a global community of law students and journalists, this is also a reminder that the work ahead has value.

Explaining a judgment, documenting an abuse and challenging an assertion of unchecked authority all help preserve the possibility of justice.

Pillay’s prize cannot protect a judge from sanctions or prevent the Pentagon from broadcasting an execution. But it recognizes decades of work that changed what courts could hear, whom they could hold responsible and which victims could obtain justice. That record gives us reason to believe that the institutions now under attack can still be defended and strengthened.