Nobel Peace Prize winners, Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov, personally accept the award despite high COVID-19 rates
Maria Ressa, Dmitry Muratov are the first journalists to receive this since Carl von Ossietzky won in 1935
Oslo, Norway:
Nobel Peace Prize laureates Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov, recognized for fighting for freedom of expression in the Philippines and Russia, will accept the award at a ceremony in Oslo on Friday, despite COVID- 19 of Norway’s high.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee says the journalists who win the prize come at a time when free, independent and fact-based journalism is being affected, the Norwegian Nobel Committee said when it announced the peace prize in October.
The ceremony at Oslo City Hall will go ahead, but there will be fewer guests than expected due to government restrictions introduced this week. Norway reported a record daily number of COVID-19 infections on Thursday.
In Sweden, where infection rates are lower than in Norway, organizers in September canceled in-person Nobel award ceremonies for the second year in progress.
Instead, the 2021 winners of Medicine, Physics, Chemistry, Literature and Economics, all prizes awarded in Sweden, receive degrees and medals in their home country, while Traditional Nobel Prize lectures are all streamed online.
Introducing the Streamed Literature lecture by winner Abdulrazak Gurnah, Mats Malm, Permanent Secretary of the awarding academy, noted that distance is part of this year’s awards as well as a key factor in the writing. work by the author, who has won the award. for stories about colonialism and the fate of refugees in the gulf between cultures and continents.
“At this Nobel lecture, this issue of distance was particularly evident,” Malm said. “Our authoring has been recorded in the UK. This is a gap that we will be able to bridge at some point in the future.”
Ressa and Muratov are the first journalists to receive the award since Germany’s Carl von Ossietzky won it in 1935 for revealing his country’s secret postwar rearmament program.
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