Nobel Peace Prize

The notorious, yet influential, German jurist, Carl Schmitt famously insisted that ‘a right of exception’ was the core reality of national sovereignty. By this he meant that internal law could be put aside by ‘the sovereign,’ inhering as the crux of the relationship between state and society. In this regard international law has no overriding claim of authority with respect to sovereign states, at least from the perspective of statist jurisprudence. This discretion to ignore or violate law is distinct from submission to law as a realistic adaptation by weak states to political realities or compliance undertaken voluntarily for pragmatic reasons of convenience and mutual benefit. When the UN was established, it was configured, to appeal both to realist minds who were eager to show that they had learned the lesson of Munich and to those architects of international cooperation that did not want the folly of the League of...

Mohandas Gandhi invented the nonviolent approach to basic social change, Satyagraha, in South Africa in the early 20th century; Nelson Mandela presided over the birth of a one person-one vote democracy at the end of the century. Both were lawyers, trained in English Common Law; good in the sense of a keen consciousness of what is right and wrong, bad in the sense of a court process identifying who is in the wrong rather than solving underlying conflicts, and wrong in the sense of punishing the wrong-doer; violence rather than cooperation. Both built on the positive side of law – the indelible rights of the people for whom they were fighting by comparing empirical facts with normative rights; immigrant Indians in the case of Gandhi, original inhabitants in South Africa, the Blacks, in the case of Mandela. Gandhi (1869-1948) did not live to see equality between Indians and whites in...

/10/janoberg.jpg”>[/caption] On March 3, 2015, The Telegraph and a few other major news surces broke the quite extraordinary story that the chairman of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee – the body that decides who is awarded the Prize – former Norwegian PM Thorbjoern Jagland had been demoted; it’s the first time it has ever happened. It was during his chairmanship the will of Alfred Nobel was ignored most systematically – e.g. by awarding the world’s allegedly most prestigious prize to President Obama, the EU and Chinese human rights (but pro-war) Liu Xiaobo. It’s about 7 years ago that a small group of Scandinavian scholars decided to investigate how this prize is managed. The basic research can be found in a book by Norwegian lawyer and author, Fredrik S. Heffermehl, The Nobel Peace Prize: What Nobel Really Wanted which was the first major result of the group’s work. It documents how...

/10/janoberg.jpg”>[/caption] The Nobel Committee again ignores Nobel’s will This prize is not a human rights or do-good prize. The two – excellent – people who are awarded the prize for 2014 have done great work for children’s rights but, unfortunately, human rights is not what Alfred Nobel sought to reward. Therefore the Nobel Committee has, once again, violated the letter as well as the spirit of Nobel’s will. The prize shall award reduction in military violence and end wars Nobel wanted to reward “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.” He also used the words “champions of peace”. The Nobel Committe seems to have converted the prize into a “do-good prize”.

Introduction He was a tall man and a great man, a visionary, pacifist, civil resister, educator and philosopher. He took life more seriously than most and he could be playful and fun like a child. His life’s guiding principle was ”Engage in your time!” and while he wrote and talked a lot he also did it. His name was Aage Bertelsen, he was born in Denmark in 1901 and died on August 15, 1980. Bertelsen’s imprint on history is two-fold. First, with his wife Gerda he was a prime mover of one of the groups, the Lyngby Group, which organised the rescue of altogether 7.220 Danish Jews into safety in Sweden in October 1943 during the German occupation of Denmark – more here. The Lyngby Group – Lyngby is north of Copenhagen – got about 1.000 of these in safety by organising their nightly transport onboard small fisher boats over the Sound between Denmark...

/10/janoberg.jpg”> Lund, Sweden – May 29, 2014 In a speech by the President of the United States of America – read by millions in all corners of our world in minutes – rest assured that every single word has been weighed with utmost care. With this in mind, Obama’s speech can be analysed as both offending to the rest of us and – exceptionally – weak. It caused no enthusiasm among the future army officers he spoke to and no enthusiasm among leading Western media. I will argue that • Intellectually and morally the speech doesn’t have the basics – full of contradictions and imbued with unbearable self-praise. • While there is a recognition of ”mistakes” such as ”our” war in Iraq and a potential step-back from interventionism, there is neither an adequate analysis of the past nor of what the future may need in terms of leadership. • Little...

To The Nobel Foundation, Stockholm Att. Lars Heikensten Executive Manager Dear Sir, Thank you for your letter dated 15th of January. It is always encouraging to be recognized and honoured by an answer welcoming continued exchange of views. We feel invited to write to you again. As an active group within the peace movement we are mainly interested and familiar with the particular conditions connected with awarding a person the Nobel Prize for Peace. As we wrote to you recently, we are not at all satisfied with the level of respect shown by the Norwegian prize committee regarding the testament of Alfred Nobel and its explicit conditions for selecting a winner of the peace prize. The Norwegian committee is hardly having any respect at all for the instructions of Nobel, in spite of their explicit clarity.

Till Nobelstiftelsen, Stockholm Att. Lars Heikensten, VD Tack för ert brev den 15 januari. Det är alltid glädjande att bli tagen på allvar och få ett svar från en aktad institution. Och vi noterar med tillfredsställelse att ”Nobelstiftelsen välkomnar denna levande debatt och ser positivt på att den fortsätter.” Det är bl a därför vi återigen skriver till er. Vi är som aktiv fredsrörelse huvudsakligen intresserade av och insatta i just villkoren för Nobels fredspris. Och som vi nyligen skrev till er är vi inte alls tillfreds med den norska priskommitténs grad av respekt för Nobels testamente och dess konkreta villkor för valet av pristagare. Den norska kommittén hyser knappast någon respekt alls för Nobels anvisningar, trots deras tydlighet. Allmänt gäller ju att belöna aktiviteter ”under det förlupna året”. För att ta exemplet Obama, hade han under det året genomfört en presidentvalskampanj med de därtill hörande rundhänta löften och överord...

Media release Lund and Oslo, April 25, 2014 The management of the Nobel Peace Prize has become a case for the Norwegian police, following a request for criminal investigation from 16 prominent Scandinavians, parliamentarians, lawyers, authors and peace activists, 10 Swedes and 6 Norwegians, to the authority on economic crime, the ØKOKRIM. The move is based on the research of Norwegian lawyer Fredrik S. Heffermehl who in his books has called for respect for Alfred Nobel and the peace plan he wished to support. – “In his last years Nobel joined the peace movement and wished to support financially its idea of co-operation on disarmament to replace military force and forces. The Norwegian Parliament appoints the five-member selection committee that must step down and be replaced by people who favor the idea of the prize,” says Heffermehl. He claims that his demands through 6 years, and even an order in...

/10/janoberg.jpg”> TFF and its founders were awarded the People’s Peace Prize on December 7, 2013 .php”>enjoy the photos and get a sense of the lovely people, the atmosphere and the fabulous Nobel dinner. While this prize is not accompanied by any money, we will that it has something the official Norwegian Nobel Prize does not have: decision-makers who know what peace is and what Alfed Nobel really intended. Thank so very much for this great encouragement. We promise to continue on the road that is peace…

Milano There it is, that fantastic duomo, the fourth in size in the Christian world, honoring their God, exuding self-confidence, and the beauty of the marble stones of the huge façade. Founded six hundred years ago, took five centuries to build, a marvel of engineering and architecture. A major concert with a choir does not manage to fill the inner space of the dome, but of the listeners, yes, with awe. Conceived in the “dark ages” as those masters of cultural violence, our historians, call them, the “middle ages”, presumably between two “shiny ages”, the Roman Empire and Western colonialism, “modern times”. Will anything built today be visited by people in five hundred years, filling them with awe? Some banks, corporations? Some corrupted national assemblies? Some stadiums, shopping centers sloppily made, collapsing, built with no love, except for money? Some huge missile ramps to sow death and harvest hatred and...

By Jan Oberg Here first the important statement by seminar participants (in Swedish below): The Nobel Peace Prize must not be misused A Nordic seminar at Orust (Sweden) about the Nobel Peace Prize has analysed the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s selection of awardees over time. Lead by former Prime Minister Torbjørn Jagland, it has awarded the prize to e.g. Wangari Maathai, Al Gore, Shirin Ebadi, Liu Xiabo, Barack Obama and institutions such as the European Union (EU). The mentioned personalities have undoubtedly contributed in various ways to a better future of the world but they have not met the criteria which Alfred Nobel formulated in his will, namely: • Active struggle for the abolition or reduction of standing armies • Contributing to the fraternity among nations • Creation of negotiations/dialogues aiming at peace and congresses for peace • Resilience as ”fredsförfäktare” – champions of peace. This unambiguous anti-militarist mandate is strongly...