It was Easy to Decide on This year’s Nobel Peace Prize Winner

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Talking to TV2, Jagland said it has been an interesting selection and not very complicated this time. He said they have had a very good and lengthy evaluation process and come up with another bold and disputed name.

Reminding the China’s boycott after the Peace Prize was awarded to dissident Liu Xiaobo, Jagland emphasized that the committee gets its authority by not having taken into account such considerations and national interests. 

- The award to Liu was a well deserved one. My impression is that it is not controversial in the international community. It is only controversial in some circles in Norway with commercial interests.

How Does The Committe Decide?

Each year, the Norwegian Nobel Committee specifically invites qualified people to submit nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize. The statutes of the Nobel Foundation specify categories of individuals who are eligible to make nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize. These nominators are:

Members of national assemblies and governments and members of the Inter-Parliamentary Union

• Members of the Permanent Court of Arbitration and the International Court of Justice at the Hague

• Members of Institut de Droit International
• University professors of history, social sciences, philosophy, law and theology, university presidents and directors of peace research and international affairs institutes
• Former recipients, including board members of organizations that have previously won the prize
• Present and past members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee
• Former permanent advisers to the Norwegian Nobel Institute

Nominations must usually be submitted to the Committee by the beginning of February in the award year. Nominations by committee members can be submitted up to the date of the first Committee meeting after this deadline.

The statutes of the Nobel Foundation do not allow information about nominations, considerations or investigations relating to awarding the prize to be made public for at least 50 years after a prize has been awarded. Over time many individuals have become known as "Nobel Peace Prize Nominees", but this designation has no official standing. Nominations from 1901 to 1956, however, have been released in a database.

Selection

Nominations are considered by the Nobel Committee at a meeting where a short list of candidates for further review is created. This short list is then considered by permanent advisers to the Nobel institute, which consists of the Institute’s Director and the Research Director and a small number of Norwegian academics with expertise in subject areas relating to the prize. Advisers usually have some months to complete reports, which are then considered by the Committee to select the laureate. The Committee seeks to achieve a unanimous decision, but this is not always possible. The Nobel Committee typically comes to a conclusion in mid-September, but occasionally the final decision has not been made until the last meeting before the official announcement at the beginning of October.

The winners of last ten years

2001		United Nations	United Nations	"for their work for a better organized and more peaceful world"
		Kofi Annan	Ghana
2002		Jimmy Carter	United States	"for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development"
2003		Shirin Ebadi	Iran	"for her efforts for democracy and human rights. She has focused especially on the struggle for the rights of women and children."
2004		Wangari Muta Maathai	Kenya	"for her contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace"
2005		International Atomic Energy Agency	United Nations	"for their efforts to prevent nuclear energy from being used for military purposes and to ensure that nuclear energy for peaceful purposes is used in the safest possible way"
		Mohamed ElBaradei	Egypt
2006		Muhammad Yunus	Bangladesh	"for advancing economic and social opportunities for the poor, especially women, through their pioneering microcredit work"
		Grameen Bank
2007		Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change	United Nations	"for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change"
		Al Gore	United States
2008		Martti Ahtisaari	Finland	"for his efforts on several continents and over more than three decades, to resolve international conflicts"
2009		Barack Obama	United States	"for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples."
2010		Liu Xiaobo[G]	China	"for his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China"
2011		Ellen Johnson Sirleaf	Liberia	"for their non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peace-building work"
		Leymah Gbowee
		Tawakel Karman	Yemen