Oslo: The Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to journalists Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov for their “courageous” defence of freedom of speech and expression in the Philippines and Russia.
The chairwoman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Berit Reiss-Anderson, made the announcement at a ceremony in Oslo on Friday evening AEDT.
“The committee is convinced that freedom of expression and freedom of information help to ensure an informed public,” she said.
“These rights are crucial prerequisites for democracy and protect against war and conflict.”
The pair beat 327 other nominees who were undisclosed but thought to include teenage climate campaigner Greta Thunberg, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, poisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny and exiled Belarus opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya.
There was also speculation the prize could go to a person or organisation involved in the coronavirus pandemic such as the creators behind the Oxford-AstraZeneca or Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines.
Ressa co-founded Rappler, a digital media company for investigative journalism, in 2012. She has focussed heavily on the Duterte regime’s murderous anti-drug campaign.
“The number of deaths is so high that the campaign resembles a war waged against the country’s own population,” Reiss-Anderson said.
“Ms Ressa has also documented how social media is being used to spread fake news, harass opponents and manipulate public discourse.”
Australian journalist Peter Greste has described Ressa as “one of the toughest and most courageous people I’ve ever come across”.
“She has taken a sustained kicking for such a long time,” he told Good Weekend.
Holding back tears, Ressa said of her win: “It’s a recognition of the difficulties, but also hopefully of how we’re going to win the battle for truth, the battle for facts. We hold the line.”
Muratov is a longstanding defender of freedom of speech in Russia and was the founder of the independent newspaper Novaja Gareta. Six of the masthead’s journalists have been killed since the paper was founded in 1993.
“Despite the killings and threats, editor-in-chief Muratov has refused to abandon the newspaper’s independent policy,” Reiss-Anderson said during Friday’s ceremony.
“He has consistently defended the right of journalists to write anything they want about whatever they want. Free, independent and fact-based journalism serves to protect against abuse of power, lies and war propaganda.”
Muratov said he was “laughing” at the recognition: “I didn’t expect it at all. It’s madness over here right now. I saw a call from Norway, but I thought it was some unwanted call.
“Here’s what I will say: we will continue to represent Russian journalism, which is now being suppressed.”
Last year’s prize went to the United Nations’ World Food Program for its work in fighting acute hunger.
The Nobel Prize has been running since 1901.
Alfred Nobel’s will said the prize should go to “the person who has done the most or best to advance fellowship among nations, the abolition or reduction of standing armies, and the establishment and promotion of peace congresses”.
Three scientists won the Nobel Prize for physics on Tuesday for helping to explain and predict complex forces of nature, including expanding our understanding of climate change.
Syukuro Manabe, 90, originally from Japan and Klaus Hasselmann, 89, from Germany were cited for their work in “the physical modelling of Earth’s climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming”.
The second half of the prize was awarded to Giorgio Parisi, 73, for “the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales”.
The panel said Manabe and Hasselmann “laid the foundation of our knowledge of the Earth’s climate and how humanity influences it”.
While the Norwegian Nobel Committee is led by a woman and has a majority of members who are women, the organisation has been criticised for a lack of diversity in this year’s list of winners.
All eight winners of the 2021 Nobel prizes in medicine, chemistry, physics and literature have been men.