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Nobel Peace Prize 2017 awarded to International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons
A nuclear disarmament group has won the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize for its decade-long campaign to rid the world of the atomic bomb.
As nuclear-fuelled crises swirl over North Korea and Iran, the International Campaign To Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) was awarded the honour on Friday.
"The organisation is receiving the award for its work to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons and for its ground-breaking efforts to achieve a treaty-based prohibition of such weapons," said Norway's Nobel committee president Berit Reiss-Andersen.
Beatrice Fihn, the leader of the grassroots ICAN organisation, was "delighted" with the prize, adding that US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un should "know that nuclear weapons are illegal".
More than 70 years since atomic bombs were used on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and as tensions flare over the North Korean crisis, the Nobel committee sought to highlight ICAN's efforts to rid the world of nuclear weapons.
Founded in Vienna in 2007 on the fringes of an international conference on the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, the Geneva-based ICAN has tirelessly mobilised campaigners and celebrities alike in its cause.
ICAN was a key player in the adoption of a historic nuclear weapons ban treaty, signed by 122 countries in July. However, the accord was largely symbolic as none of the nine known world nuclear powers signed up to it.
Asked for her message to Trump and Jong-un, ICAN's Executive Director Beatrice Fihn said: "Nuclear weapons are illegal. Threatening to use nuclear weapons is illegal. Having nuclear weapons, possessing nuclear weapons, developing nuclear weapons, is illegal, and they need to stop."
The Nobel committee said ICAN "has been a driving force in prevailing upon the world's nations to pledge to cooperate... in efforts to stigmatise, prohibit and eliminate nuclear weapons".
Ms Reiss-Andersen noted that similar prohibitions have been reached on chemical and biological weapons, land mines and cluster munitions.
"Nuclear weapons are even more destructive, but have not yet been made the object of a similar international legal prohibition," she said.
Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Walsstrom said that giving the prize to ICAN was "well-deserved and timely."
The organisation will receive its prize - consisting of a gold medal, diploma, and a cheque for nine million Swedish kronor (£845,000) at a ceremony in Oslo on December 10, the anniversary of the death in 1896 of the prize's creator, Swedish philanthropist and dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel.
The Norwegian committee that chooses the winner sorted through more than 300 nominations for this year's award, which recognises both accomplishments and intentions.
The prize announcement was made in Oslo on Friday morning, culminating a week in which Nobel laureates have been named in medicine, physics, chemistry and literature.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee does not release names of those it considers for the prize, but said 215 individuals and 103 organisations had been nominated.
What is the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons?
The Geneva-based campaign was launched 10 years ago at an international conference on the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, reports Harry Curtis.
Its aim was to consolidate the anti-nuclear movement and push for a global ban akin to those in place for biological and chemical weapons and landmines.
The group was particularly inspired by the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, which received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 for its work leading to the Mine Ban Treaty.
Through 2007, ICAN began organising marches and started attracting high-profile support from mayors, Nobel laureates and weapons inspectors around the world. Later supporters would include the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, Yoko Ono, and then-UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, who would go on to say that the movement was "on the right side of history."
Operating as a coalition of 468 non-governmental organisations across 101 countries, ICAN has launched a schools campaign and one calling on banks and pension funds not to "bank on the bomb".
A UN resolution calling for the worldwide elimination of nuclear weapons was adopted in 2009, and in July this year ICAN's efforts came to fruition with the Nuclear Weapons Ban Treaty being signed in New York.
It is this treaty that ICAN now aims to promote, though it is – as the campaign's chief, Beatrice Fihn acknowledges – only "a starting point". Though 122 countries voted to adopt the new treaty at the UN, none of the world's nuclear states were among them.
The treaty will also only take effect once 50 countries have signed and ratified it. Though there are already 53 signatories, the process of all these countries ratifying and becoming parties to the ban could take years.
ICAN's humanitarian stance again nuclear weapons does not just highlight their immediate destructive capabilities, but also draws attention to the amount of money spent on them, which globally exceeds $105 billion annually – a sum it argues could be spent to alleviate human suffering in other areas.
How the Nobel Peace Prize winner is decided
The five members of Norway's Nobel committee unveiled their choice at 10am in what is traditionally an eagerly-anticipated award handed out during the foundation's prize-giving week.
Lawmakers, cabinet ministers, former laureates and university professors are among the thousands of people around the world entitled to suggest candidates for the Peace Prize.
The award is announced in October, but is always handed out on December 10 - the anniversary of Alfred Nobel's death.
This year's Nobel prizes for physics, chemistry, medicine and literature have already been announced - all going to men.
Controversy and debate: A history of Nobel Peace Prize winners
The Nobel Peace Prize is one of the most prestigious honours on the planet, but it has provoked plenty of debate over the years.
Since the first award in 1901, it has been awarded to 130 recipients. One noteworthy anniversary this year is the centenary of the Red Cross's first of three awards.
The roots of the award were in the will of Alfred Nobel, the wealthy Swedish industrialist and the inventor of dynamite.
In it, he said he wanted the award handed to the "person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses".
In 1901, five years after his death, a committee in Norway picked Switzerland's Henry Dunant, the founder of the Red Cross, and Frederic Passy, the French economist who believed free trade among nations promoted peace, as the first recipients of the awards.
Since it is a very political decision, the award has often provoked controversy, such as in 1973 when US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and North Vietnamese leader Le Duc Tho were honored for their efforts to achieve a cease-fire in the Vietnam War.
And there was also the controversy over why some - such as Mahatma Gandhi - never won.
Bar a few occasions, the award has been handed out annually.
During the world wars of the first half of the 20th century, no peace prize was awarded except on the two occasions when it was given to the Red Cross, in 1917 and 1944. The organisation won it again in 1963 - no recipient has won it as often.
US presidents regularly win, from Theodore Roosevelt in 1906 through to Barack Obama in 2009.
Other organisations to have won the award include Amnesty International and the European Union.
Sixteen women have been awarded the award, the most recent being Malala Yousafzai in 2014, who won alongside Kailash Satyarthi for "their struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education".