The 2024 Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to the Japanese organization Nihon Hidankyo “for its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and for demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again.”
Nihon Hidankyo is a grassroots movement of atomic bomb survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki is also known as Hibakusha.
According to its website, the organization describes itself as “the only nationwide organization of A-bomb survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Hibakusha) ... The total number of the surviving Hibakusha living in Japan is 174,080, as of March 2016. There are several thousands of more Hibakusha living in Korea and other parts of the world outside Japan.”
Jørgen Watne Frydnes, chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, said they had been unable to get in touch with anyone from the organization to tell them about the award.
The committee said that the prize to Nihon Hidankyo acknowledged that “no nuclear weapon has been used in war in nearly 80 years. The extraordinary efforts of Nihon Hidankyo and other representatives of the Hibakusha have contributed greatly to the establishment of the nuclear taboo.”
The award was announced at the Norwegian Nobel Institute in Norway’s capital Oslo.
Last year’s winner was Narges Mohammadi, the imprisoned Iranian human rights activist and journalist, “for her fight against the oppression of women in Iran and her fight to promote human rights and freedom for all”
This is a breaking story and will be updated.
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