The Norwegian Nobel Committee has announced that the group has won the peace prize “for its decisive contribution to the building of a pluralistic democracy in Tunisia in the wake of the Jasmine Revolution of 2011.”
The quartet, which includes Tunisian labour, industry, legal and human rights groups, was formed in the summer of 2013 when “the democratization process was in danger of collapsing as a result of political assassinations and widespread social unrest.”
“It established an alternative, peaceful political process at a time when the country was on the brink of civil war,” the Nobel committee said.
Last year, Pakistan’s children’s rights activist Malala Yousafzai, at the age of 17, became the youngest-ever Nobel laureate, when she shared the prize with India’s Kailash Satyarthi.
The Prize in Economic Sciences in memory of Alfred Nobel will be awarded on Monday, October 12.
BREAKING NEWS The 2015 Peace #NobelPrize is awarded to the National Dialogue Quartet in Tunisia pic.twitter.com/3O9jzwBK08
— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 9, 2015
Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich won the Nobel Prize in Literature, which was awarded Thursday. On Wednesday, Sweden’s Tomas Lindahl, Paul Modrich of the United States and Turky-born scientist Aziz Sancar won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their research on DNA repair. A Canadian scientist, Arthur McDonald, shared Tuesday’s Nobel Prize in Physics with Japan’s Takaaki Kajita for their experiments demonstrating that subatomic particles called neutrinos change identities and have mass. On Monday the 2015 Nobel Prize in Medicine went to scientists from Japan, the U.S. and China who discovered drugs that are now used to fight malaria and other tropical diseases.
Press release on the 2015 Peace #NobelPrize to the National Dialogue Quartet in Tunisia: https://t.co/ihHOvdoxf5 — The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 9, 2015
The Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for its role in helping the country’s transition to democracy.
The chairman of the Nobel committee Norway said the group had made a “decisive contribution to the building of a pluralistic democracy” after the 2011 revolution.
They were among some 273 contenders including German chancellor Angela Merkel and Pope Francis for the prestigious prize.
The 2015 Nobel Peace Prize announcement #NobelPrize https://t.co/Lx0bhQm7QH
— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 9, 2015
