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Tag: Nobel Peace Prize

  • Angolan President nominated for Nobel Peace Prize

    Angolan President nominated for Nobel Peace Prize

    Angolan President Joao Lourenco has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of his role in promoting peace and stability across Africa.

    The nomination, submitted by Angolan academic and international policy analyst Afonso Botaz, cites President Lourenco’s contributions as the African Union (AU) Champion for Peace and Reconciliation, particularly his mediation in regional conflicts.

    According to Botaz, Lourenco’s diplomacy has been crucial in easing tensions between the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Rwanda, preventing escalation into open conflict. He also played a stabilizing role in the Central African Republic by coordinating with continental partners to avert a deeper political crisis.

    In his nomination letter, Botaz stated: “President Lourenco’s brand of diplomacy rests on dialogue and respect for the sovereignty of other States. His work reinforces a deep commitment to the pacification of regional conflicts. It is a quiet, effective diplomacy that builds calm step-by-step rather than through mere ceremony.”

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    “If the Nobel Peace Prize is meant to reward the dedicated practice of peace, then President Lourenco’s record presents the kind of steady, trusted leadership that the continent and the world benefit from, concluded Botáz.

    The nomination also points to Lourenço’s domestic agenda, including national reconciliation, institutional reform, and advocacy for historical justice and reparations for African people. These efforts, Botáz argued, have strengthened state institutions and enhanced Angola’s credibility on the global stage.

    President Lourenco, who was inaugurated in 2017 as Angola’s third Head of State, has focused his administration on economic reforms, democratic consolidation, and positioning Angola as a key diplomatic voice in Africa.

  • Congolese Mukwege, Iraq’s Murad win 2018 Nobel Peace Prize

    Denis Mukwege, a gynecologist helping victims of sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Nadia Murad, a Yazidi rights activist and survivor of sexual slavery by Islamic State, yesterday won the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize.

    The Norwegian Nobel Committee said it had awarded them the prize for their efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war.

    “Both laureates have made a crucial contribution to focusing attention on, and combating, such war crimes,” it said in its citation.

    Mukwege heads the Panzi Hospital in the eastern Congolese city of Bukavu. Opened in 1999, the clinic receives thousands of women each year, many of them requiring surgery from sexual violence.

    He had devoted his life to defending these victims, the citation said.

    Murad is an advocate for the Yazidi minority in Iraq and for refugee and women’s rights in general. She was enslaved and raped by Islamic State fighters in Mosul, Iraq in 2014.

    She was a witness who tells of the abuses perpetrated against herself and others, the citation said.

    “Each of them in their own way has helped to give greater visibility to war-time sexual violence, so that the perpetrators can be held accountable for their actions,” it said.

    Murad was 21-years-old in 2014 when Islamic State militants attacked the village where she had grown up in northern Iraq. The militants killed those who refused to convert to Islam, including six of her brothers and her mother.

    Murad, along with many of the other young women in her village, was taken into captivity by the militants, and sold repeatedly for sex as part of Islamic State’s slave trade.

    She eventually escaped captivity with the help of a Sunni Muslim family in Mosul, the group’s de facto capital in Iraq, and became an advocate for the rights of her community around the world.

  • Malala excited after winning place at Oxford University

    Malala excited after winning place at Oxford University

    Pakistani education activist Malala Yousafzai said on Thursday she was “excited” after winning a place to study at Oxford University.

    Yousafzai, the youngest winner of the Nobel Peace Prize when she was 17, said she had been accepted at Oxford to study Politics, Philosophy, and Economics.

    She joined thousands of other students in Britain in discovering where they will go to university after getting their final school results.

    Others to have studied the same course at Oxford, one of the world’s top universities, include former British Prime Minister David Cameron and late Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.

    Yousafzai, now 20, came to prominence when a Taliban gunman shot her in the head in 2012, after she was targeted for her campaign against efforts by the Taliban to deny women education.

    She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014.

    “So excited to go to Oxford!! Well done to all A-level students, the hardest year. Best wishes for life ahead!” she said in a tweet.

    A-levels are final year exams for school students.

    After recovering from the Taliban attack, she has attended school in England.

    Early figures showed a fall in the number of places allocated by universities, although the proportion of students scoring top grades rose.

    University admissions service UCAS said on its website the decrease in the number of university acceptances had been driven by a fall in acceptances from older students and fewer students from the European Union.

    UCAS said 416,310 people had been accepted to degree courses on A-level results day, down two percent compared to 2016.

    Over one in four of the grades was an A or A*, the best ratings, up 0.5 percentage points in 2016.

  • Tunisian mediator group wins Nobel Peace Prize

    Tunisia’s National Dialogue Quartet won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for helping build democracy in the birthplace of the Arab Spring, an example of peaceful transition in a region otherwise struggling with violence and upheaval.

    The quartet of the Tunisian General Labour Union (UGTT), the Tunisian Confederation of Industry, Trade and Handicrafts (UTICA), the Tunisian Human Rights League (LTDH), and the Tunisian Order of Lawyers was formed in the summer of 2013.

    It helped support the democratisation process when it was in danger of collapsing, the Norwegian Nobel committee said in its citation.

    “This is a great joy and pride for Tunisia, but also a hope for the Arab World,” UGTT chief, Hussein Abassi, told Reuters.

    “It’s a message that dialogue can lead us on the right path. This prize is a message for our region to put down arms and sit and talk at the negotiation table.”

    With a new constitution, free elections and a compromise politics between Islamist and secular leaders, Tunisia has been held up as a model of how to make the transition to a democracy from dictatorship.

    “This a brilliant example, I think Tunisia is one of the Arab countries that has done best since the so-called Arab Spring and the upheavals in that part of the world,” said Ahmad Fawzi, chief United Nations spokesman, in Geneva.

    The Nobel Peace Prize, worth 8 million Swedish crowns ($972,000), will be presented in Oslo on December 10.

  • Dalai Lama calls inter-faith meeting in India to counter violence

    The Dalai Lama will convene a rare meeting of India’s religious leaders to try to tackle rape, communal violence and other issues facing the world’s biggest democracy, an aide said yesterday.

    The Nobel Peace Prize winner has invited India’s spiritual leaders for the two-day meeting this weekend to seek practical strategies to address “important issues ailing society today”, a statement said.

    The aide, Gelek Namgyal, said the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism, who has lived in India since 1959, was deeply concerned about levels of violence in the country, along with environmental degradation and poverty.

    Namgyal said the Dalai Lama’s initiative was not a criticism of India’s Hindu nationalist right-wing government, which swept to power in May.

    But the meeting in New Delhi, the first such gathering organised by the Dalai Lama, comes at a time of rising communal tensions in India, particularly between majority Hindus and minority Muslims.

    Those expected to attend include Hindu guru Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, a senior Muslim cleric, the archbishop of Bombay and the head of the Jewish community in Delhi, the statement said.

    News of the meeting comes on the eve of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to India to build stronger ties.

    The Dalai Lama, who fled an uprising against Chinese rule in Tibet in 1959, lives in the northern hill station of Dharamsala and is reviled by Beijing.

  • Syria monitors win Nobel Peace Prize

    The Hague-based Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the body overseeing destruction of such weapons in Syria, has won the Nobel Peace Prize.

    The Nobel Committee said it was in honour of the OPCW’s “extensive work to eliminate chemical weapons.”

    BBC says OPCW was established to enforce the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention.

    It recently sent inspectors to carry out the dismantling of Syria’s stockpile of chemical weapons.

    The watchdog picks up a gold medal and 8m Swedish kronor ($1.25m; £780,000) as winner of the most coveted of the Nobel honours.

    Pakistani schoolgirl campaigner Malala Yousafzai and gynaecologist Denis Mukwege of the Democratic Republic of Congo had been tipped as favourites to take the award.

    Others who had been listed as contenders were Chelsea Manning (formerly Bradley Manning); the United States soldier convicted of giving classified documents to WikiLeaks and Maggie Gobran, an Egyptian computer scientist who abandoned her academic career to become a Coptic Christian nun and founded the charity Stephen’s Children.

    But an hour before Friday’s announcement, Norway’s public broadcaster reported the award would go to the OPCW.

    The 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention has contributed to the destruction of nearly 80 per cent of the world’s chemical weapons stockpile.

     

  • EU wins Nobel Peace Prize

    EU wins Nobel Peace Prize

    The European Union has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for six decades of work in advancing peace in Europe.

    The committee said the EU had helped to transform Europe from a continent of war to a continent of peace.

    BBC says the award comes as the EU faces the biggest crisis of its history, with recession and social unrest rocking many of its member states.

    The last organisation to be given the award outright was Medecins Sans Frontieres, which won in 1999.

    Announcing the award, Nobel committee president Thorbjoern Jagland acknowledged the EU’s current financial problems and social unrest.

    But he said the committee wanted to concentrate on the body’s work over six decades of advancing “peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights.”

    The committee president highlighted the EU’s work in sealing the reconciliation between France and Germany in the decades after World War II.

    And he praised the organisation for incorporating Spain, Portugal and Greece after their authoritarian regimes collapsed in the 1970s.

    He said the EU’s reconciliation work had now moved to Balkan countries, and pointed out that Croatia was on the verge of membership.

    Reacting to the award, EU Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said on his Twitter feed: “It is a great honour for the whole of the EU, all 500 million citizens, to be awarded the 2012 Nobel Peace prize.”