International Nobel Peace Prize for anti-nuclear weapons organization

The Japanese peace organization Nihon Hidankyo has been awarded this year's Nobel Peace Prize. The organization is being honoured for its commitment to a world free of nuclear weapons and also for demonstrating through testimonies that such weapons should never be used again. This was announced by the Norwegian Nobel Committee in Oslo. The new chairman of the committee, Jørgen Watne Frydnes, said at the award ceremony that it had not yet been possible to contact the organization to inform them of their award.

In times of conflict in the Middle East, the war in Ukraine and dozens of other violent conflicts in the world, no clear favorite for the Nobel Peace Prize had emerged this year before the prize was announced. A total of 286 candidates were nominated this year, including 197 personalities and 89 organizations. This was significantly fewer than in previous years. The names of the nominees are traditionally kept secret by the Nobel institutions for 50 years.

Several human rights activists were recently honored

In recent years, the Nobel Committee has awarded the Nobel Prize several times to human rights activists instead of classic peacemakers. Last year, the award went to the imprisoned Iranian women's rights activist Narges Mohammadi. She was honored "for her struggle against the oppression of women in Iran and her fight for the promotion of human rights and freedom for all".

This week, this year's Nobel Prize winners in the categories of medicine, physics, chemistry and literature have already been announced in Stockholm. On Monday, the award in economics will follow, the only one that does not go back to the will of dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel (1833-1896), but has been endowed by the Swedish central bank since the end of the 1960s.

The Nobel Prizes are all traditionally presented on the anniversary of Nobel's death on December 10, with the Nobel Peace Prize being the only one to be awarded in Oslo rather than Stockholm. The awards are endowed with prize money of eleven million Swedish kronor (just under 970,000 euros) per category.