The Nobel Peace Prize for 2018 was awarded to Denis Mukwege and Nadia Murad for their efforts to contain war-time sexual violence.
Nadia Murad is a human rights activist from Iraq. She was one of an estimated 3,000 girls and women from the Yazidi minority who were victims of rape and other abuses by the terror group ISIS when it overran key cities in the country in 2014.
In testimony to the United States Congress in June 2016, Murad detailed how she and thousands of other Yazidi women and girls enslaved and raped by their ISIS captors. She recounted how six of her brothers and her mother were executed by ISIS in a single day.
Mukwege, 63, was recognised for two decades of work to help women recover from the violence and trauma of sexual abuse and rape in war-torn eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.
Known as “Doctor Miracle”, he is an outspoken critic of the abuse of women during war who has described rape as “a weapon of mass destruction.”
Women, children and even babies just a few months old, Mukwege has treated tens of thousands of victims of rape at Panzi hospital which he founded in 1999 in South Kivu.
The Nobel Prize for Peace is awarded, according to the will of Swedish inventor and industrialist Alfred Bernhard Nobel, to “the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” Unlike the other prizes, the Peace Prize may be awarded to an institution. It is conferred by the Norwegian Nobel Committee in Oslo.
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