Nobel peace prize 2021: journalists Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov win – live

Reporting the award of the 2021 peace prize to their founder, Maria Ressa, Rappler said:

Annoucing the award, the Nobel committee chair, Berit Reiss-Andersen, said:

Rappler, the site news website founded by Ressa in 2012 “has focused critical attention on the [President Rodrigo] Duterte regime’s controversial, murderous anti-drug campaign,” the committee said, adding that Ressa and Rappler “have also documented how social media is being used to spread fake news, harass opponents and manipulate public discourse”.

Muratov was one of the founders of the independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta in 1993. The committee said the newspaper was “the most independent newspaper in Russia today, with a fundamentally critical attitude towards power”.

It added: “The newspaper’s fact-based journalism and professional integrity have made it an important source of information on censurable aspects of Russian society rarely mentioned by other media.”

Dmitry Muratov is a Russian journalist and the editor-in-chief of the newspaper Novaya Gazeta, described by the Committee to Protect Journalists as “the only truly critical newspaper with national influence in Russia today”, which he edited between 1995 and 2017.

Muratov won a CPJ international press freedom award in 2007 for his courage in defending press freedom in the face of attacks, threats and imprisonment.

Maria Ressa is a Filipino-American journalist and author, the co-founder and CEO of Rappler, who spent nearly two decades as an investigative reporter in south-east Asia for CNN.

In 2020 she was convicted of cyberlibel under a controversial Philippine law against cybercrime, a move widely condemned by rights groups and journalists as an attack on press freedom.

The Guardian published this editoral about Ressa last year, calling her a “courageous journalist” and her conviction a move “designed to chill the media”.

And here is the committee chair, Berit Reiss-Andersen, preparing for her announcement:

The Nobel peace prize in numbers, courtesy of the committee, while we wait for the announcement of this year’s winner, now due in a little over 10 minutes’ time:

101 Nobel peace prizes have been awarded between 1901 and 2020.
25 organisations have been honoured.
2 peace prizes have been divided between three persons.
17 women have been awarded the Nobel peace prize.
1 peace prize laureate, Le Duc Tho, has declined the prize.

Berit Reiss-Andersen, the chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, will be reading out this year’s winner in Oslo in a little over 20 minutes’ time.

This was her announcing last year’s laureate – and their reaction:

A reminder, if any were needed, that while everybody has their favourites, the Nobel committee regularly chooses a peace prize laureate no one was really expecting:

So far this week, on Monday the Nobel committee awarded the prize in medicine to the Americans David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian for their discoveries about how the human body perceives temperature and touch.

The Nobel prize in physics went on Tuesday to Sykuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann and Giorgio Parisi, whose work found order in seeming disorder, helping to explain and predict complex forces of nature, including expanding our understanding of climate change.

On Wednesday Benjamin List and David WC MacMillan were named as laureates of the Nobel prize for chemistry for finding an easier and environmentally cleaner way to build molecules that can be used to make compounds, including medicines and pesticides.

On Thursday the Nobel prize for literature was awarded to the British-based Tanzanian writer Abdulrazak Gurnah, recognised for his “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee”.

And on Monday next week the prize for outstanding work in the field of economics will be awarded.

The full list of nominations is kept secret, but nominators are free to disclose them. In recent years, Norway’s MPs have tended to release names of their nominees in advance – six of the last seven winners appeared on those lists.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee – five individuals appointed by the Norwegian parliament, often retired politicians, lawyers and academics – choose the winner (and can make their own nominations).

They meet once a month after nominations close on 31 January each year, counselled by a group of permanent advisers and other experts. They try to reach a consensus, but if they can’t then their decision is by majority vote.

This year, there are 329 candidates for the peace prize, the Nobel committee has said. How do nominations work?

According to the will of the Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, who founded the awards, 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”.

Prospective laureates can be nominated by members of governments and parliaments; current heads of state; university professors of history, social sciences, law and philosophy; and former Nobel peace prize laureates, among others. The full list is kept locked away in a vault for 50 years.