Winners of the Nobel Peace Prize announced VIDEO / PHOTO

Winners of the Nobel Peace Prize announced VIDEO / PHOTO

"The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided to award the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize to Maria Ressa from the Philippines and Dmitry Muratov from Russia for their efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace", said today the president of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Berit Reiss-Andersen.

"Without freedom of speech and journalism, it would be difficult to promote cooperation between nations," the Committee said.

The prestigious award is accompanied by a gold medal and a cash prize in the amount of 10 million Swedish krona, which is slightly more than 1.14 million dollars.

The monetary amount of the award comes from the legacy left by the creator of the award, the Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, who passed away in 1895. Last year's award went to the United Nations World Food Program, which was established in 1961 with the goal of fighting hunger around the world.

That branch of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Agency, based in Rome, was praised at the time for its efforts to prevent the use of hunger as a weapon of war and conflict. So far, this year's winners of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, Physics, Chemistry and Literature have been announced.

The winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics will be announced next week. On March 1, the Nobel Foundation announced that a total of 329 candidates had been nominated for this year's Nobel Peace Prize. The names of some people who could be candidates were mentioned in the public earlier, and they are environmental activist Greta Thunberg and Kremlin opponent Alexei Navalny.

Mention is also made of the World Health Organization (WHO), the Vaccine Alliance (GAVI), the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and Reporters Without Borders (RSF).

The Norwegian Peace Committee is not in the habit of announcing the names of the candidates to the media or to the candidates themselves. The Peace Prize is awarded in Oslo, unlike other Nobel Prizes awarded in Stockholm, and is traditionally awarded on December 10, the day of the death of the prize's founder, Swedish scientist and industrialist Alfred Nobel (1833-1896), the inventor of dynamite.

The Nobel season began on Monday with the announcement of the winner of the Nobel Prize in Medicine. This year's winners are American scientists David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian for the discovery of temperature and touch receptors.

The winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics, Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann and Giorgio Parisi, were announced on Tuesday. They were awarded "for a revolutionary contribution to the understanding of complex physical systems."

On Wednesday, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to German scientist Benjamin List and British scientist David McMillan "for the development of asymmetric organocatalysis".

On Thursday, the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Tanzanian novelist Abdulrazak Gurna, who was awarded for "empathic and uncompromising presentation of the consequences of colonialism and the fate of refugees trapped between cultures and continents," the decision said.

The Nobel season will end on Monday with the announcement of the winners of the award for economics.

The Nobel Prize consists of a gold medal, a diploma and a check for nine million krona (about one million euros), while the monetary amount of the prize is divided if there are several laureates in one discipline.