It’s here! The race for the biggest award on this planet – the Nobel Peace Prize – has begun! There are many favourites and there are many assumptions, but nothing has been made official in accordance with the rules. On Wednesday, the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced the cryptic details of the 2023 nominations for peace prize. This year, 305 have made it to the final race. This list includes both individuals as well as organisations.
The deadline for sending the nominations for this year’s awards was till February 1st. According to the nodal agency, 305 candidates were selected for the final nominations. The count of finalists is the lowest that the Norwegian Nobel Committee has seen in the last four years, an AP report said.
While the names of the finalists have not been made public, what we do know is that among the 305 candidates, there are 93 organisations and 212 persons. According to the data provided by the Oslo-based oragnisation, over the last eight years, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has seen more than 300 finalists on an annual basis. The highest number of candidates that the panel saw was in 2016 when 376 candidates were nominated.
The committee made it amply clear that who are the nominees and who exactly nominated them will remain a top secret as it has been for the last five decades. But what is publicly known is that there are groups of individuals who can submit their choice of nominations. This group includes previous Nobel prize winners, university professors, heads of states, chief of foreign policy institutes among others. For example, green crusader Greta Thunberg was nominated by Norwegian lawmaker Lan Marie Nguyen Berg of the Green Party. He had also nominated Ugandan Vanessa Nakate for pro-climate actions.
On Feb. 1, the director of the Peace Research Institute Oslo, Henrik Urdal, shortlisted human rights activists as his favourites to win the 2023 award. They included Narges Mohammadi, an Iranian human rights activist and Mahbouba Seraj, an Afghan women’s rights activist; Myanmar’s representative to the United Nations, Kyaw Moe Tun; and the Netherlands-based International Court of Justice, among others.
Every year on December 10, which happens to be the death anniversary of Alfred Nobel, five prizes are awarded in Nobel’s memory. The Nobel prizes will be announced in October later this year. The prize includes a gold medal, a diploma and a cash award of about $1 million — which often is shared. The peace prize has often attracted a lot of debate. In 2021, both Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump were nominated for the Nobel peace Prize.
(With agency inputs)