The Japanese grass roots group Nihon Hidankyo, comprised of survivors of Second World War atomic bombings, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo on Friday.
The committee said the award given to the group, also known as also known as Hibakusha after the Japanese word referring to survivors of the bombing of the Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was timely given what it said were “alarming” and increasing threats to wield nuclear power in war.
“Hibakusha is receiving the Peace Prize for its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and for demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again,” the Norwegian Nobel Committee said in its citation.
Groups and organizations have been honoured by the committee with increasing frequency in the past 20 years, including the International Atomic Energy Agency (2005), the European Union (2012), the World Food Programme (2020) and Russia’s Memorial and Ukraine’s Centre for Civil Liberties, joint winners along with Belarussian human rights activist Ales Bialiatski in 2022.
Past individual winners of the Peace Prize have included Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and Malala Yousafzai. Last year’s the award went to Narges Mohammadi, the imprisoned activist who has campaigned for women’s rights and the abolition of the death penalty in Iran.
Laureates honoured on Dec. 10
The Norwegian Nobel Committee is comprised of five individuals and makes its decisions based on nominations that must be submitted by Jan. 31.
The committee seeks a consensus on its selection. If there is none, the decision is reached by majority vote.
British Canadian scientist Geoffrey Hinton, known as the godfather of AI, was announced as the winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, along with American John Hopfield. The duo are being honoured for discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning within artificial neural networks.
Thousands of people can propose names: members of governments and parliaments; current heads of state; university professors of history, social sciences, law and philosophy; and former Nobel Peace Prize laureates, among others. This year, there are 286 nominees, although the full list will be locked in a vault for 50 years.
The Nobel prizes are presented to the laureates on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death, in Oslo.
