Nadia Murad awarded the Nobel Peace Prize

Nobel Peace Prize for anti-rape activists Nadia Murad and Denis Mukwege

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[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]Image copyrightREUTERSImage captionMs Murad and Mr Mukwege made a "crucial contribution" to fighting violence against women
The 2018 Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to campaigners against rape in warfare Nadia Murad and Denis Mukwege.
Ms Murad is an Iraqi Yazidi who was tortured and raped by Islamic State militants and later became the face of a campaign to free the Yazidi people.
Mr Mukwege is a Congolese gynaecologist who, along with his colleagues, has treated tens of thousands of victims.
Some 331 individuals and organisations were nominated for the prestigious peace award this year.
The winners announced in the Norwegian capital Oslo on Friday won the award for their "efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war", Berit Reiss-Andersen, the Nobel committee chair, said.

• Denis Mukwege: Rape surgeon of DR Congo
  
• Nadia Murad wins human rights award
  
• Who are the Yazidis?
  

The pair both made a "crucial contribution to focusing attention on, and combating, such war crimes," Ms Reiss-Andersen added.

Who are the winners?

Ms Murad, 25, endured three months as a sex slave at the hands of Islamic State (IS) militants. She was bought and sold several times and subjected to sexual and physical abuse during her captivity.
She became an activist for the Yazidi people after escaping IS in November 2014, campaigning to help put an end to human trafficking and calling on the world to take a tougher line on rape as a weapon of war.
BBC Persian's Nafiseh Kohnavard, who met Ms Murad after she had escaped from her IS captors, tweeted an image of the meeting after the prize was announced.


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Ms Murad described her escape in a BBC interview in 2016, detailing how the women who were held captive were treated by IS.





Media captionNadia Murad tells the BBC's Hardtalk how she escaped IS
She was awarded the Vaclav Havel Human Rights Prize by the Council of Europe in 2016 and called for an international court to judge crimes committed by IS in her acceptance speech in Strasbourg.
She was named the UN's first goodwill ambassador for survivors of human trafficking later that year.
Mr Mukwege, 63, has spent decades helping rape victims in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
He and his colleagues are said to have treated about 30,000 rape victims, developing great expertise in the treatment of serious injuries sustained during sex assaults that were carried out as a weapon of war.
[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]Image copyrightGETTY IMAGESImage captionMr Mukwege is an expert in the treatment of serious sexual injuries
Mr Mukwege has won a number of international prizes, including the 2008 UN Human Rights Prize, and was named African of the Year in 2009.
He lives under the permanent protection of UN peacekeepers at his hospital and has also previously called for a tougher line on rape as a weapon of war.

Who else has won a Nobel award this year?

Earlier this week the Nobel prize for physics was awarded to Donna Strickland, only the third woman winner of the award and the first in 55 years. The Canadian was announced along with Arthur Ashkin, from the US, and Gerard Mourou, from France.
The Nobel prize for medicine was awarded to two scientists - Professor James P Allison from the US and Professor Tasuku Honjo from Japan - who discovered how to fight cancer using the body's immune system.

• Nobel peace winners throughout the years
  

How is the prize decided?

• Eligible nominators from around the world can put forward candidates up to 1 February of the award year, while Nobel Committee members have more time
  
• All nominations are reviewed by the committee - whose five members are chosen by the Norwegian parliament - before a shortlist of 20-30 candidates is selected
  
• A group of Norwegian and international advisers write individual reports on the shortlisted candidates. Using these and further reports, the committee narrows the selection down to a handful
  
• A decision is reached in the last meeting of the committee, usually in late September or early October, before the prize is announced
  
• If a unanimous decision cannot be reached, a simple majority vote is used
  
• After the announcement, the award ceremony takes place on 10 December, the date of Alfred Nobel's death
  
• Previous winners include figures such as Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr, Mother Theresa and the Dalai Lama
  
• Last year ithe prize was won by the anti-nuclear weapons group International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, a coalition of NGOs whose work has highlighted the humanitarian risk of such weapons
  

Congratulations to Nadia.

That's awesome!

CONGRATULAZIONI
I hope her life too is going well now

A wonderful recognition for Nadia!  Congratulations to a strong and brave young woman.

Her statement to the UN

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Nadia Murad carries the fight for traumatised Yazidis
The Iraqi campaigner’s Nobel prize is inspiring and much-needed, writes Emma Graham-Harrison, who has reported for the Guardian and Observer on the plight of Yazidi women

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Emma Graham-Harrison
Fri 5 Oct 2018 07.15 EDTLast modified on Fri 5 Oct 2018 15.06 EDT

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[size=89]As a child, Nadia Murad Basee wanted to be a teacher or open a beauty salon, but as she reached the cusp of adulthood Isis swept into her small Iraqi village, and destroyed her world, her family and her dreams.
She was captured in August 2014 and sold into sexual slavery, targeted because her family belonged to the minority Yazidi religion.
Repeatedly raped and repeatedly sold on, she endured months of torture until one captor left a door unlocked. She gambled her life on an escape bid, and made it to safety.

[size=16]Nobel peace prize 2018 won by Denis Mukwege and Nadia Murad - as it happened

 
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Then, even as she grappled with the mental and physical aftershocks of extreme trauma, she decided to speak publicly about what she had suffered.
That meant revisiting her torture repeatedly, and in public. But Murad is extraordinarily brave, and her courage is amplified by dignity and clarity of purpose in telling her story.
She called her autobiography The Last Girl – because she wants her campaigning to ensure she is “the last girl in the world with a story like mine”


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 Nobel peace prize 2018 winners: who are Denis Mukwege and Nadia Murad? – video profile
She has focused on support for survivors, and a long-term search for justice, calling on the world to collect and preserve evidence that would allow Isis militants to be brought to trial.
It has proved a long and often thankless campaign, even though she has built an extraordinary alliance of supporters, from celebrity lawyer Amal Clooney to Samantha Power, US ambassador to the UN under Barack Obama.
The world was appalled when news first seeped out that Isis had revived sexual slavery, and survivors dominated headlines around the world.
But much of that interest turned out to be passing and, as Isis’s self-declared caliphate shrank, the fate of tortured and abducted Yazidi women faded from the news.

The west and the Iraqi government have declared victory in the battle against the group. But thousands of Yazidis are still missing, and thousands more who endured sexual slavery or other violence still live in traumatised limbo in refugee camps, often with the most minimal medical and psychological support.
So it is inspiring to see Murad recognised with perhaps the world’s most prestigious prize. It is an award that celebrates her own extraordinary courage and vital work for women everywhere, and will hopefully cast much-needed light on the plight of the survivors she represents.