Recognising recent tensions arising out of nuclear arms and testing—North Korea and the US are a case in point—the Norwegian Nobel Committee has conferred the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize on the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN). This was announced on Friday (October 6).

ICAN is a coalition of hundreds of NGOs spread across 100 countries, and is based in Geneva. ICAN played a key role in facilitating the negotiations that led to the signing of the legally binding Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. While 122 nations signed the Treaty (on July 7) nine nations didn’t. They included US, France and seven other nuclear-armed nations, including India. Netherlands had voted against, while Singapore had abstained.

“The organization is receiving 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,” the Committee said in a statement.

This is not the first time that an organization has won the Noble Peace Prize for nuclear disarmament. In the year 2005, International Atomic Energy Agency won the prize “for their efforts to prevent nuclear energy from being used for military purposes and to ensure that nuclear energy for peaceful purposes is used in the safest possible way”.

In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which was headed by Rajendra Pachauri, former head of TERI, won the Noble Peace Prize. Another Indian recipient, Kailash Satyarthi, won the prize in 2014 for the abolition of child labour.

—India Legal Bureau