The Norwegian Nobel Committee, a panel made up of five members appointed by Parliament, awarded the prize this Friday to the Venezuelan opponent María Corina Machado. The committee has chosen her for “her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her fight to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.”
Since 1901, the committee has been the body in charge of appointing the person it considers meets the criteria of the founder of the award. Nobel’s wish, explicitly included in his will, lists the key points sought in the profile of the most deserving candidate: “[…] “the person who has most or best contributed to fostering brotherhood among nations, the abolition or reduction of standing armies, and the establishment and promotion of peace congresses.”
The Nobel Peace Prize, the last of the five awards that Alfred Nobel indicated in his will – the other categories include Medicine or Physiology, Physics, Chemistry and Literature – is awarded on the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death, on October 10, after the rest of the prizes already announced throughout this week.
In 2024, the award went to , the Japanese national organization of survivors of the atomic bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, known as the Hibakusha, “for their efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and for demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons should never be used again,” in the words of the committee’s then president, Jorgen Watne Frydnes.
