The Nobel Prizes are five separate prizes awarded to those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind, as established by the 1895 will of Swedish chemist, engineer, and industrialist Alfred Nobel, in the year before he died. Prizes were first awarded in 1901 by the Nobel Foundation. Nobel's will indicated that the awards should be granted in the fields of Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature, and Peace. A sixth prize for Economic Sciences, endowed by Sweden's central bank, Sveriges Riksbank, and first presented in 1969, is also frequently included, as it is also administered by the Nobel Foundation. The Nobel Prizes are widely regarded as the most prestigious awards available in their respective fields.
Elizabeth Williams was a peace activist from Northern Ireland. She was a co-recipient with Mairead Corrigan of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1976 for her work as a cofounder of Community of Peace People, an organisation dedicated to promoting a peaceful resolution to the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
Mairead Maguire, also known as Mairead Corrigan Maguire and formerly as Mairéad Corrigan, is a peace activist from Northern Ireland. She co-founded, with Betty Williams and Ciaran McKeown, the Women for Peace, which later became the Community for Peace People, an organization dedicated to encouraging a peaceful resolution of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Maguire and Williams were awarded the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize.
Shirin Ebadi is an Iranian Nobel laureate, lawyer, writer, teacher and a former judge and founder of the Defenders of Human Rights Center in Iran. In 2003, Ebadi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her pioneering efforts for democracy and women's, children's, and refugee rights. She was the first Muslim woman and the first Iranian to receive the award.
Nkosi Johnson was a South African child with HIV and AIDS who greatly influenced public perceptions of the pandemic and its effects before his death at the age of 12. He was ranked fifth amongst SABC3's Great South Africans. At the time of his death, he was the longest-surviving child born HIV-positive in South Africa.
Kailash Satyarthi is an Indian social reformer who campaigned against child labor in India and advocated the universal right to education.
The KidsRights Foundation is an international children's aid and advocacy organisation based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The foundation was founded in 2003, by Marc Dullaert and Inge Ikink. KidsRights raises funds for independent local aid projects in a number of countries around the world, including India, South Africa and the Philippines.
The 2009 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to United States President Barack Obama for his "extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples". The Norwegian Nobel Committee announced the award on October 9, 2009, citing Obama's promotion of nuclear nonproliferation and a "new climate" in international relations fostered by Obama, especially in reaching out to the Muslim world.
Dawn Engle is the co-founder and former executive director of the non-profit PeaceJam Foundation.
Malala Yousafzai is a Pakistani female education activist and the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize laureate at the age of 17. She is the youngest Nobel Prize laureate in history, the second Pakistani and the only Pashtun to receive a Nobel Prize. Yousafzai is a human rights advocate for the education of women and children in her native homeland, Swat, where the Pakistani Taliban had at times banned girls from attending school. Her advocacy has grown into an international movement, and according to former Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi, she has become Pakistan's "most prominent citizen."
The World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates was initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1990s, as a forum in which the Nobel Peace Laureates and the Peace Laureate Organizations could come together to address global issues with a view to encourage and support peace and human well-being in the world. Its Permanent Secretariat is an independent, non-profit, ECOSOC non-governmental organization, based in Piacenza, operating on a permanent basis. A permanent staff, mainly composed of volunteers, promotes the work of the Nobel Peace Prize Winners and organizes the World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates on a yearly basis. To date, the Permanent Secretariat has organized 17 Summits, the most recent having been held in February 2017 in the city of Mérida, Mexico.
The 2014 Nobel Peace Prize was shared, in two equal parts, between Kailash Satyarthi and Malala Yousafzai "for their struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education". Satyarthi is from India, the seventh person from his country to win a Nobel Prize and the second to win the Peace Prize after Mother Teresa, while Yousafzai is a Muslim from Pakistan, the second Nobel Prize winner from her country after Abdus Salam, the forty-seventh woman to win the Nobel Prize, and at the age of 17 years, the youngest winner of a Nobel Prize in any field.
The Anna Politkovskaya Award was established in 2006 to remember and honor the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya (1958–2006), murdered in Moscow on 7 October 2006 in order to silence her reporting about the war in Chechnya.
Nadia Murad Basee Taha is an Iraqi-born Yazidi human rights activist based in Germany. In 2014, as part of the Yazidi genocide by the Islamic State, she was abducted from her hometown of Kocho in Iraq and much of her community was massacred. After losing most of her family, Murad was held as an Islamic State sex slave for three months, alongside thousands of other Yazidi women and girls.
Michaela "Chaeli" Mycroft is a South African ability activist with cerebral palsy who won the International Children's Peace Prize in 2011. The medal was presented to her by Nobel Peace Laureate Mairead Maguire.
The 2018 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Denis Mukwege and Nadia Murad "for their efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict," according to the Norwegian Nobel Committee announcement on 5 October 2018 in Oslo, Norway. "Both laureates have made a crucial contribution to focusing attention on, and combating, such war crimes," according to the award citation. After reading the citation, Committee Chair Berit Reiss-Andersen told reporters that the impact of this year's award is to highlight sexual abuse with the goal that every level of governance take responsibility to end such crimes and impunities.
Leilua Lino is a Samoan human rights activist, who works to raise awareness of gender-based violence and violence against children in Samoa, through her own personal experience. She was a finalist in 2018 for the International Children's Peace Prize. In 2019, she was the first recipient of a Commonwealth Innovation for Sustainable Development Award (Peace).
Divina Stella Maloum is an activist from Cameroon. She is the founder of Children for Peace (C4P) in Cameroon. She set up the organisation when she was 11 or 12 years old. She was inspired by children who were exploited, child marriages and child soldiers. She uses cartoons to communicate with children to avoid language barriers. She is a changemaker for peace. On November 20, 2019 - World Children's Day, when she was 14, she was joint winner of the International Children's Peace Prize together with Greta Thunberg. She was one of 137 applicants from 56 countries. The winners were announced by Desmond Tutu and the award was presented by Nobel Peace Prize recipient Kailash Satyarthi in a ceremony at The Hague. The prize was 100,000 euros to be spent on their cause.
PeaceJam is a US-based global youth organization led by Nobel Peace laureates. It was founded by musical artist Ivan Suvanjieff and his wife, the economist Dawn Engle in 1993.
