The prize according to Alfred Nobel’s will should be conferred on “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”.
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Kristian Berg Harpviken, head of the Peace Research Institute Oslo, says Merkel’s “humane response” to the immigration crisis has shamed other European leaders, helping to avert an even worse humanitarian crisis. This commitment to nonviolence, which the Pope has put into practice every day through his words and actions, is at the core of the principles behind the Nobel Peace Prize. However, the committee disclosed that there have been 273 names this year. That includes 205 individuals and 68 organizations.
But the German chancellor, who has welcomed hundreds of thousands of refugees into her country and vowed to take in more, has topped most lists.
‘Angela Merkel is the one who really took a moral leadership, ‘ he said. However, she has angered politicians at home and in transit countries like Hungary, who accuse her of creating an irresistible lure for millions who are unhappy in their homelands.
How much more peaceful things would be today had we kept our GIs at the front in Iraq and Afghanistan, as we’ve had to do for so many decades in, say, Europe and Korea. He answers his phone 24 hours a day and has saved the lives of thousands of people making the risky crossing across the Mediterranean by passing on their Global Positioning System coordinated to the Italian coastguard.
Summary: Here is our list of those who should have but unfortunately couldn’t make it to the list of Nobel laureates.
Harpviken feels the 40-year-old priest may have been overshadowed in recent months.
There have been a few notable omissions on the winners’ list over the years, but none so significant as that of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. But his lack of open-mindedness about women being able to serve as priests is a knock against his popularity, and Harpviken wonders if past snubs indicate he won’t win the Peace Prize this year. Others warn against insulting authoritarian leaders and refer back to the imprisoned 2010 peace prize laureate Liu Xiaobo. Before he died on December 10, 1896, Nobel gave the largest share of his fortune in his last will to a series of prizes, dubbed the Nobel Prizes.
With the Nobel Peace Prize committee set to announce its 2015 victor on Friday, Pope Francis is once again seen as a front-runner, a status reinforced by his role in brokering a deal for the normalization of relations between the United States and Cuba last December.
“But I don’t think that would be a main reason for giving him the prize”, Harpviken said.
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In such a case, the prize could go to the architects of the deal, US Secretary of State John Kerry and his Iranian counterpart Javad Zarif, and possibly even European Union foreign affairs chief Federica Mogherini or her predecessor Catherine Ashton, according to Peter Wallensteen, a professor at Sweden’s Uppsala University. Kissinger’s award was one of the most controversial in the prize’s history, with Tho refusing to accept the award and two Nobel prize committee members resigning in protest.
