The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) won the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, at a time when, as the committee said, “the risk of nuclear weapons being used is greater than it has been for a long time.”
ICAN was granted the award “for its work to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons and for its ground-breaking efforts to achieve a treaty-based prohibition of such weapons,” said Norwegian Nobel Committee chairman Berit Reiss-Andersen.
The committee described ICAN, a coalition of non-governmental organizations in 100 countries, as “a driving force in prevailing upon the world’s nations to pledge to cooperate with all relevant stakeholders in efforts to stigmatize, prohibit, and eliminate nuclear weapons.”
The coalition recently played a notable role in garnering support for the historic United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which was adopted by 122 countries on July 7. The nine nations with nuclear weapons—the United States, China, France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, and the United Kingdom—declined to endorse the treaty.
After the prize was announced, ICAN said in a statement:
“This prize is a tribute to the tireless efforts of many millions of campaigners and concerned citizens worldwide who, ever since the dawn of the atomic age, have loudly protested nuclear weapons, insisting that they can serve no legitimate purpose and must be forever banished from the face of our earth,” the statement also said. “It is a tribute also to the survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—the hibakusha—and victims of nuclear test explosions around the world.”
Multiple survivors of the WWII atomic bombings praised the committee’s decision to recognize ICAN.
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