The 2024 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded this Friday (11) to the Japanese organization Nihon Hidankyo, which brings together survivors of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 and focuses on combating the spread of nuclear weapons.
The chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Jorgen Watne Frydnes, said those chosen for the prize received it for “their efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and for demonstrating through their testimonies that nuclear weapons should not be used again, no more”.
“These historical witnesses helped generate and consolidate widespread opposition to nuclear weapons around the world, drawing on personal stories, creating educational campaigns based on their own experience, and issuing urgent warnings against the spread and use of nuclear weapons. Hibakusha help us describe the unspeakable, think the unthinkable, and somehow understand the incomprehensible pain and suffering that nuclear weapons cause,” Frydnes added.
The Japanese Nobel laureate organization works to publicize the story of the Hibakusha, the survivors of the nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, launched by the USA at the end of the Second World War.
The Nobel committee highlighted that, through them, “no nuclear weapons have been used in wars for 80 years.”
“The extraordinary efforts of Nihon Hidankyo and other representatives of the Hibakusha contributed greatly to the establishment of the ‘nuclear taboo,’ therefore, it is alarming that today this taboo against the use of nuclear weapons is under pressure,” the committee expressed.
The director of the Japanese organization Nihon Hidankyo, Toshiyuki Mimaki, said the award will give “a great boost to demonstrate that the abolition of nuclear weapons is possible.”
This is the only award in the series to be awarded in Oslo, Norway, while the others (Medicine, Physics, Chemistry, Literature and Economics) are announced and awarded in Stockholm, Sweden.
They will be awarded on December 10th in simultaneous ceremonies in Stockholm and Oslo, commemorating the death of Alfred Nobel, founder of the award. Each laureate will receive a diploma, a gold medal and the sum of US$1.1 million (about R$6 million).
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