Alone among Nobel Prize winners based in Sweden, the Nobel Peace Prize is chosen by a Norwegian committee composed of five members selected by that country’s parliament. According to Alfred Nobel’s will, it is awarded to someone who worked on “brotherhood” between nations, by reducing armies and organizing peace congresses. It has expanded to involve all kinds of advocates, from international organizations such as the World Food Program to doctors who help rape survivors.
The possible political motivations for this award are still being closely examined to see what kind of message the committee is sending to the world. THE The 2022 prize was awarded to human rights activists from Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, although applications were closed before the invasion. In 2021, the prize was awarded to defenders of press freedomincluding one from Russia.
Here is a shortlist of candidates selected by the Oslo Peace Research Institutewho has picked winners in the past.
The return to power of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the “Women, Life, Freedom” uprising in Iran, following the the death of Mahsa Amini, 22, detained by Iran’s morality police for an alleged violation of the country’s conservative dress code for women, have drawn attention to women fighting for their rights in these countries and elsewhere.
Afghan activist Mahbouba Seraj did not hesitate to speak out when the Taliban takeover in August 2021 led to new restrictions on women, particularly on their right to education.
“For the love of God, please open girls’ schools,” she told Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid in a documentary broadcast in August on Al Jazeera. “If you don’t solve this problem, Mr. Moudjahid, the whole world will rise against you. »
Unlike so many feminist activists in Afghanistan, Seraj refused to flee and continues to run several women’s projects in the country.
But as international aid dries up and the Taliban further expands restrictions, Seraj appears increasingly exasperated, telling a session of the UN Human Rights Council in September 2022: “How much How many times am I supposed to shout and say, “World, pay!” pay attention to us; Are we dying?’
Iranian activist and journalist Narges Mohammadi, who began her decades-long career advocating for civil society and women’s rights, works from prison to oppose the conditions in which she and her fellow inmates are held.
Accused of “spreading propaganda”, this 51-year-old man is serving a 10-year sentence in the famous Evin prison in Tehran. Last year, she published the book “White Torture” about Iran’s use of solitary confinement and sensory deprivation against her and her fellow detainees.
On the anniversary of Amini’s death, Mohammadi and others staged a protest from inside Evin prison, burning their scarves, according to a post on one of his media accounts social.
A colleague of the activist, speaking on condition of anonymity for security reasons, said Mohammadi “is one of the very few people who not only remained in Iran, but who remains active, whether absent or imprisoned.”
Iran is carrying out waves of arrests targeting activists, journalists and intellectuals in an attempt to stamp out dissent and tighten social restrictions. After protests erupted following Amini’s death last year, Iranian authorities arrested some 20,000 people.
Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, a Kankanaey Igorot from the mountainous northern region of the Philippines, began her activism as a youth leader during the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, protesting a controversial dam that would have flooded her ancestral domain. people.
Decades later, she is best known as the United Nations special rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples from 2014 to 2020.
In 2018, the Philippine government of President Rodrigo Duterte included Tauli-Corpuz in its group. a list of suspected terrorists. Human rights watchdogs say this act of “red-tagging” – linking people to communism and terrorism – is an intimidation tactic used to target critics of the government. It also often precedes attacks, even murders, pushing Tauli-Corpuz to leave the country.
She “became the embodiment of the very problem she documented as special rapporteur: the criminalization of indigenous activists,” New York Times wrote in 2018.
Carlos Conde, a researcher at Human Rights Watch, welcomed his inclusion in the Nobel Peace Prize shortlist, saying the harassment and enforced disappearances of indigenous activists in the Philippines continues under Duterte’s successor, Ferdinand Marcos Jr. “His appointment alone will highlight the serious situation they find themselves in and should spur the international community into action,” he said.
Juan Carlos Jintiach, from the Shuar people of Ecuador, has spent decades advocating on behalf of indigenous communities protecting the Amazon rainforest and fighting climate change. He is the executive secretary of Global Alliance of Territorial Communitiesa platform of indigenous organizations from tropical rainforests from 24 countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
The alliance works to protect the rights of indigenous communities to access and protect their own lands, and to do so safely, without criminalization or risk to their lives. Jintiach helped lead a campaign for direct and sustainable funding for indigenous communities defending their territories.
Jintiach cites studies showing that only a small fraction of global climate finance is allocated to indigenous environmental protectors. “The big promises that have been circulating globally for indigenous peoples are not reaching the territories,” Jintiach said in an interview.
A Nobel Prize for the International Court of Justice would shine a spotlight on conflict resolution, a potentially attractive theme in an era of widespread conflict and war.
The tribunal, established in the aftermath of World War II, is the UN’s principal judicial body charged with resolving legal disputes between countries. Although its decisions are not legally binding, they carry great moral authority.
The ICJ is responsible for addressing legal issues related to some of the most intractable challenges of our time, such as climate change, humanitarian disasters and Russia’s war in Ukraine.
In March 2022, the court made headlines by ordering Russia to end its military operations in Ukraine. Last month, Russian lawyers told judges that Ukraine’s complaint against Moscow constituted an “abuse of process.” The case is pending.
A Nobel victory for the court would draw attention to work that is poorly understood and often confused with that of the International Criminal Court, or ICC. But some fear that an ICJ victory could wrongly give the impression that the court’s role is to support just causes, when it is supposed to be impartial.
When Myanmar’s military overthrew a democratically elected civilian government in February 2021, people responded with unprecedented nationwide protests. Opposition to the military takeover has been more inclusive than ever before in Myanmar’s history, bridging historic divisions, analysts say.
Many of the country’s ethnic groups have joined with exiled lawmakers to form the Advisory Council of National Unity, an alliance that advocates the formation of a federal democracy.
The NUCC helped support a multi-front armed resistance against the military, which used increasingly brutal tactics to crush opposition, including raze entire villages and launch airstrikes on civilian targets.
Despite escalating military violence, the situation in Myanmar, also known as Burma, is not a top priority for many of the world’s most powerful countries. Kyaw Moe Tun has led efforts to keep Myanmar on the international agenda. Appointed Myanmar’s permanent representative to the United Nations before the coup, he retained his post despite the junta’s multiple attempts to overthrow him.
From UN headquarters in New York, he has been one of the most effective spokesmen of the resistance, pressuring world leaders to adopt ever-tighter sanctions against military rule and provide aid to the country’s civilians.
Analyzing human rights figures
The Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) is a US-based non-profit organization that uses data to uncover, quantify and analyze patterns of mass violence, or to put it more simply and cite its motto, the The group’s staff members are “human rights statisticians.” »
Since 1991, HRDAG has turned to statistics, demography, computer science and the social sciences to produce “unbiased scientific results that provide clarity on human rights violence”, e.g. through estimates of the number of victims and crimes committed in conflicts, according to his organization. website. In partnership with local and international organizations, HRDAG has published reports on violence in countries including Syria, Guatemala, Liberia, Kosovo and East Timor, as well as police violence in the United States.
HRDAG’s findings have been used in legal proceedings, such as in the International Criminal Court’s trial against former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic for his role in the Balkan wars of the 1990s. More recently, HRDAG and the Colombian Truth Commission have published a massive open-resource database on Colombia’s 50-year conflict, which ended in 2016.
Rick Noack in Islamabad, Pakistan; Susannah George in Dubai; Régine Cabato in Manila; Samantha Schmidt in Bogotá, Colombia; Emily Rauhala in Brussels; Rebecca Tan in Singapore; and Miriam Berger in Washington contributed to this report.
