Tunisian democracy group receives 2015 Nobel Peace Prize

The Economic Sciences Prize is presented on behalf of the Swedish National Bank.

Likening those “barbaric and heinous terrorist acts” to Paris, Bamako, Beirut, Sharm el-Sheikh, Houcine Abassi, the head of the Tunisian General Labor Union, said the world needed to fight terrorism, which he tied to the creation of a Palestinian state.

The Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet is composed of union L’Union générale tunisienne du travail (UGTT), employers’ organisation L’Union tunisienne de l’industrie, du commerce et de l’artisanat (UTICA), human rights organisation La Ligue tunisienne des droits de l’homme (LTDH), and national lawyers’ association L’Ordre national des avocats de Tunisie (ONAT).

Two other major attacks had rocked the country before last month’s bus bombing: in March, 22 people were killed at the Bardo Museum in Tunis, and 38 tourists were killed in a beach resort massacre in June.

“This prize is not one awarded to the quartet exclusively”, he said, adding that it also honoured the victims of the Jasmine Revolution in 2011 and militant attacks, as well as women and young people, political parties, and all of Tunisian society.

“We are very anxious because each time there’s a terrorist act, some… say that if there’s terrorism, you have to put human rights aside”, Abdessatar Ben Moussa, head of Tunisia’s Human Rights League, told AFP in an interview just before the award ceremony.

She said the 8 million Swedish kronor ($1.3 million CAD) prize was for the quartet as a whole, not for the four individual organizations.

In neighbouring Sweden, the Nobel Prize winners in literature, chemistry, physics, medicine and economics were gathering in Stockholm to receive their prizes from the King of Sweden later in the day.

Professor William C Campbell was awarded the prize in October along with Japanese scientist Satoshi Ōmura and Chinese researcher Tu Youyou for their discoveries of treatments against parasites.

Takaaki Kajita from Japan and Arthur McDonald from Canada were awarded the physics prize for determining that neutrinos have mass, a key piece of the puzzle in understanding the cosmos.

Belarussian writer and dissident Svetlana Alexievich was given the literature prize for her work chronicling the horrors of war and life under the repressive Soviet regime.

During the ceremony, Claes Gustafsson, a member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, outlined the history of DNA research and discussed the work of Modrich, Sancar and Lindahl.

Last year, when prize winners Malala Yousafzai and Kailash Satyarthi were receiving their award, a Mexican student without an official invitation, ran onto the stage waving his country’s flag, which he had smuggled into the heavily guarded ceremony.

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