The Nobel Institute said today that 305 nominations for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize had been received while staying tight-lipped regarding the names on the list.
According to the Oslo-based institute’s website, the nominations, which are lower than the record 376 registered in 2016, include 212 persons and 93 organizations.
The identity of the nominees is kept hidden for 50 years by Nobel laws.
Those entitled to nominate, however, including former laureates, parliamentarians, and cabinet ministers from any country in the world, as well as select university professors, are free to reveal the identity of the person or organization they have nominated.
Like last year, most of the names publicly disclosed are involved in the almost year-long violence raging in Ukraine or opponents of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, and a Ukrainian group working to establish an international war crimes tribunal are among them.
Others known to have been nominated include imprisoned activist Alexei Navalny
Others known to have been nominated include imprisoned Putin critics such as anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny, who was poisoned, journalist and political activist Vladimir Kara-Murza, and the pro-democracy youth movement Vesna.
Climate activists Greta Thunberg of Sweden and Vanessa Nakate of Uganda are also thought to be on the list this year, as is Iranian women’s campaigner Masih Alinejad and her anti-hijab movement My Stealthy Freedom, as well as the Salvation Army.
Chinese and Hong Kong pro-democracy activists (Chow Hang-tung, Peng Lifa, the group Uyghur Tribunal), Myanmar’s ambassador to the UN Kyaw Moe Tun (sacked by the junta but still in office), the anti-junta coalition NUCC, and Maggie Gobran, who helps the poor in Cairo’s slums, are believed to have been nominated.
This year, the Nobel Peace Prize was shared by the Russian human rights organization Memory, Ukraine’s Center for Civil Liberties (CCL), and imprisoned Belarusian rights champion Ales Bialiatski, a trio representing the three nations at the heart of Ukraine’s war, which all three have condemned.