Press Release: Peace organisations say no to the Norwegian Nobel Committee 2025

Introduction

by John Y. Jones, co-chair of Lay Down Your Arms

The first chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Jørgen Løvland, in 1910 said about that year’s laureate, The International Peace Bureau, that “we are convinced that this award is entirely in the spirit of Alfred Nobel’s plan; he wanted his money to be used to support accelerate and promote the peace movement.”

Nobel characterized a “Champion for Peace” by three words. We find that these three come together beautifully when coming together as a wheel:

Alfred Nobel aimed by establishing a prize for a “Champion of Peace” was to celebrate and encourage “the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations and the abolition or reduction of standing armies and the formation and spreading of peace congresses.”

In other words: a person who the previous year has brought together conflicting nations in a peaceful dialogue that made weapons and violence obsolete.

However, deviations from Løvland’s simple and clarifying statement have been many in the more than one hundred awards made by miscellaneous Nobel committees. In a centenary article, the former committee secretary Geir Lundestad stated that the success of the Prize has been “the committee’s broad definition of peace, enough to take in virtually any relevant field of peace work”. To Lundestad the aim was to create “a success-story” and not to adhere to Nobel’s words.

Ironically, this year’s committee chair, Frydnes, also claims that the laureate fits the requirements stated by Nobel in his will. But while Løvland knew his Nobel, Frydnes obviously does not.

But let us first look at some formalities. The Norwegian Nobel Committee is not an autonomous entity. It answers, according to Swedish law, to the Swedish Nobel Institute and subsequently to the national body that oversees Swedish foundations, the Swedish Kammar-kollegiet. It ruled in 2012 that

The Norwegian Nobel Committee is not an independent body, but subject to Swedish Foundational law and accountable to the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm.

When the Nobel committee later asked to be exempt from being bound to Nobel’s formulations and will, the answer was a firm NO. In 2014 they ruled that:

The selection of Peace Prize laurates will have to be made in strict accordance with Alfred Nobels’ will and in no way to be exempt from testator’s instruction and limitations (11/03/2014).

Therefore, the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s annual choice of laureates must be authorised by The Nobel Foundation. It is an open question to what extent this is followed up. The Nobel Committee’s chair for 2025 was eager to underline that Maria Machado is a candidate in line with Nobel’s will:

Maria Corina Machado meets all three criteria stated in Alfred Nobel’s will for the selection of a Peace Prize laureate. She has brought her country’s opposition together. She has never wavered in resisting the militarization of Venezuelan society. She has been steadfast in her support for a peaceful transition to democracy.

A close reading of Nobels will, the 2025 chair’s statement and Machado’s life and merits, shows that the committee cannot be further from the truth.

However, national party politics and building opposition to national governments is not something Alfred Nobel considers in his will. His vision is that a candidate should have worked for “fraternity between nations” in other words building bridges between conflicting nations. It is illustrative of Machado's work that another presidential candidate and opposition politician in Venezuela, Henriko Capriles, expressed to the newspaper El Pais that while he himself focused on dialogue with the incumbent leadership in Venezuela, Machado was confrontational, even “extreme”.

The box above shows just a few examples taken from Machado’s recent, violent history, juxtaposed to Nobel’s words and the committee’s version of it. It is a grave injustice to other worthy, but ignored, Peace Prize candidates over the years, and to possible candidates in 2025, that the prize this year was given to Machado.

The Nobel committee of 2025 has arrived at its sad choice of laureate due to a mix of misreading Nobel’s text and glamourizing and falsely rewriting her life and merits. At best, this is a result of a lack of proper research by the committee and its advisory team at the Norwegian Nobel institute. In addition, a proper process of scrutiny by the main Nobel Committee in Sweden would most certainly have prevented committing this injustice.

Operating with a diluted and all-embracing definition of “peace” may have been popular and a "success " by some people’s standards, but certainly not by Nobel’s. The Norwegian Nobel Peace Prize’ scholar and expert, the lawyer Fredrik Heffermehl, states that “This consistent misuse of the entrusted funds for over one hundred years is no small scandal…. [it is] a deliberate embezzlement.”

To clean up the decades of malpractice by the Norwegian Nobel Committee is a question of sound jurisprudence. Swedish foundational law cannot be victim to haphazard and random whims of one commission after the other, and their pragmatic search for “successes” and “popular” candidates in order to maintain the status of what they consider “the most prestigious prize in the world.”.

The will of Alfred Nobel, the testator, must be the sole compass when selecting a Champion of Peace. It is high time that this principle be respected by the Norwegian Nobel Committee.

In conclusion, the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s choice of Champion for Peace 2025 will come to haunt, not only the Norwegian Nobel Committee, but the entire Nobel family and all five annual Nobel laurates and their reputation for years, if not decades, to come. It rests upon the Swedish Nobel Foundation, the Mother-Institution responsible for overseeing that Nobel’s will is respected, to process the clean-up.

We, the Nordic Peace organization Lay Down Your Arms criticizes no specific person or government. But we want to confront and change a long-time malpractice and an ongoing breach against a will that belongs to all humanity. By instrumentalizing the Nobel Peace Prize for political aims as has been done, in particular, in this year’s allocation, we witness not only a betrayal of Alfred Nobel, but of the world’s peace movements end eventually the world’s entire moral architecture.