Liu Xiaobo Nobel Peace Prize Laureate

This year’s Nobel Peace Prize laureate is Liu Xiaobo, a Chinese professor of literature who is serving an 11-year prison sentence for advocating democratic reform.

A spokesperson for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs has already stated that awarding the Nobel to this dissident would be scandalous. Among the nominees, insiders highlighted Afghan doctor and women’s rights advocate Sima Samar and former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who has been nominated for the award several times. When Alfred Nobel signed his will on November 27, 1895, he allocated the majority of his wealth for the awarding of prizes, one of which, as stated in the will, would be awarded to the person who has contributed the most to the strengthening of brotherhood among nations, the abolition or reduction of standing armies, as well as for the holding and promotion of peace congresses. The Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded since 1901 and has not been awarded 19 times. In those years, the prize was not awarded due to certain provisions in the statutes of the Nobel Foundation.

So far, the Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to 61 individuals, 28 times it has been shared by two laureates, and once by three (Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres, and Yitzhak Rabin). The youngest Nobel Peace Prize laureate was Irish peace activist Mairead Corrigan, who was 32 years old when she received the award in 1976, and the oldest laureate was Joseph Rotblat, who was 87 years old when he received the award in 1995. Among the Nobel Peace Prize laureates, there have been 12 women, the first of whom was Bertha von Suttner in 1905. Among the awarded women were Mother Teresa, Aung San Suu Kyi, and Shirin Ebadi.

The work of the International Red Cross has been awarded three times, and its founder was the first Nobel Peace Prize laureate in 1901. UNHCR has been awarded twice. One laureate declined the Nobel Peace Prize – Vietnamese politician Le Duc Tho, who was supposed to share the award in 1973 with then U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. The award was given to them for the negotiations that preceded the Vietnam Peace Agreement. Le Duc Tho stated that he could not accept the award, citing the situation in Vietnam as the reason. The only posthumous Nobel Peace Prize laureate was Dag Hammarskjöld in 1961.

Since 1974, the statutes of the Nobel Foundation stipulate that the prize cannot be awarded posthumously. The only posthumous laureate of the Prize besides Hammarskjöld was Erik Axel Karlfeldt, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1931. All Nobel Prizes are awarded in Stockholm, except for the Nobel Peace Prize, which is awarded in Oslo. The Norwegian committee sends thousands of letters each year inviting qualified individuals to nominate candidates for the Nobel Peace Prize. The names of the nominees and other information about the nominations can only be published after 50 years, but the committee still announces the number of nominees each year.

Among the nominees who did not receive the award from 1901 to 1950 were Adolf Hitler, Mahatma Gandhi, and Joseph Stalin. Mahatma Gandhi, one of the greatest symbols of nonviolence in the 20th century, was nominated five times, the last time shortly before he was assassinated in 1948. Although he did not receive the award, the Norwegian committee decided that year that it would not be awarded because there was no suitable living candidate. Hitler was nominated once, in 1939, by Swedish parliamentarian E.G.C. Brandt, who later changed his mind and withdrew the nomination on February 1, 1939. Among the statesmen and leaders who were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize but did not receive it were Thomas G. Masaryk, Edvard Benes, Neville Chamberlain, Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Konrad Adenauer, Juan and Eva Peron, and Jawaharlal Nehru.

In addition to the monetary award and diploma, laureates receive a medal depicting Alfred Nobel. On the reverse side of the medal are three men in a brotherly alliance with the inscription: Pro pace et fraternitate gentium (For peace and brotherhood among people). Among the interesting facts related to Nobel laureates is that Linus Pauling received the Nobel Prize twice, in 1954 for Chemistry and in 1962 for Peace, and that Winston Churchill received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953. (www.hrt.hr)