List of Nobel Peace Prize Laureates

List Of Nobel Peace Prize Laureates

The Norwegian Nobel Committee each year awards the Nobel Peace Prize (Norwegian and Swedish: Nobels fredspris) "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." It is one of the five Nobel Prizes established by the 1895 will of Alfred Nobel (who died in 1896), awarded for outstanding contributions in chemistry, physics, literature, peace, and physiology or medicine. As dictated by Nobel's will, the award is administered by the Norwegian Nobel Committee and awarded by a committee of five people elected by the Parliament of Norway. The first Nobel Peace Prize was awarded in 1901 to Frédéric Passy and Henry Dunant. Each recipient receives a medal, a diploma, and a monetary award prize that has varied throughout the years. In 1901, Passy and Dunant shared a Prize of 150,782 Swedish kronor, which was equal to 7,731,004 kronor in 2008. In 2012, the Prize was awarded to the European Union. The Peace Prize is presented annually in Oslo, in the presence of the King of Norway, on December 10, the anniversary of Nobel's death, and is the only Nobel Prize not presented in Stockholm. Unlike the other prizes, the Peace Prize is occasionally awarded to an organisation (such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, a three-time winner) rather than an individual.

The prize is considered the most controversial of the Nobel Prizes with several of the selections having been criticised. Despite having been nominated five times, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi never won the Prize. Following his assassination in 1948, the committee considered awarding it to him posthumously but decided against it and instead withheld the Prize that year with the explanation that "there was no suitable living candidate." In 1961, Dag Hammarskjöld, who died after his nomination but several months before the announcement, became the only Laureate to be recognised posthumously; following this, the statutes were changed to make a future posthumous prize nearly impossible. In 1973, Le Duc Tho declined the Prize, because "he was not in a position to accept the Prize, citing the situation in Vietnam as his reason." Linus Pauling, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate in 1962, is the only person to have been awarded two unshared Nobel Prizes; he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1954.