This year’s announcement as to who shall win the Nobel Peace Prize is wide-open, with a pope, a whistlebower and even President Putin among the 278 candidates tipped to lift one of the world’s most revered accolades. The Local looks ahead to the event in Oslo on Friday.
The race for the Nobel Peace Prize, to be announced Friday, has rarely been as open or unpredictable, experts say, with Pope Francis and Edward Snowden tipped as possible winners.
Snowden, the former intelligence analyst who revealed the extent of US global eavesdropping, was one of the joint winners of the “alternative Nobel peace prize” last month. A hero to some and a traitor to others, he would be a highly controversial choice for the 7 million kroner ($1.11 million) award.
The Pakistani girls’ education campaigner Malala Yousafzai – who was also a favourite last year – is also said to be in the running along with the pope and a Japanese pacifist group.
Predicting the winner is even harder than usual this year, as the Nobel committee has received a record 278 candidates, so experts only have the names of those made public by their sponsors to go on.
Snowden, a former National Security Agency (NSA) analyst, was proposed by two Norwegian members of parliament. Last month he shared the “alternative” $210,000 Norwegian Right Livelihood Award with The Guardian newspaper and human rights and environmental activists.
But from his exile in Russia, the US fugitive said during a recent press conference that “it is somewhat unlikely that the Nobel committee would back…” him winning the real Nobel.
However, other Russian-based individuals or groups could be a popular choice for the Nobel Committee.
“Russia’s policy in Ukraine, annexing Crimea and questioning borders, but also the way the Kremlin treats dissenters cannot be ignored by the Nobel committee,” said Antoine Jacob, author of a history of the Nobel prizes.
For the Nobel committee president Thorbjoern Jagland, “sanctioning Moscow would… be a way to prove that he acts independently, since (Jagland) is (also) the Secretary General of the Council of Europe, which counts Russia as a member,” Jacob told AFP.
Co-founded by Mikhail Gorbachev in 1993 with part of his peace prize money, the pro-democracy Moscow newspaper Novaya Gazeta has been tipped as a possible laureate. It is one of the few independent media outlets left in Russia and has seen several of its journalists murdered, including Anna Politkovskaya who exposed huge human rights abuses in Chechnya.
Kristian Berg Harpviken, director of the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), a leading peace prize analyst and one of the few to publish a shortlist, revised his prediction in the last week, putting the peace group Japanese People Who Conserve Article 9 – which wants to maintain the Asian country’s anti-war constitution – in first place ahead of Malala…. see more
source: thelocal
Tags: Noble Peace Prize 2014, World
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