On the eve of the Nobel Peace Prize announcement, the Scandinavian organisation Lay Down Your Arms awarded the U.N. special rapporteur on occupied Palestine to highlight a peace champion working in line with the will of Alfred Nobel.
Francesca Albanese, special rapporteur on the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967, during a press briefing at U.N. headquarters in New York on Oct. 30, 2024. (UN Photo/Mark Garten)
From the TFF Transnational Foundation
Lay Down Your Arms awards its annual prize to the United Nations special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories – as the person who, in accordance with Alfred Nobel’s will, has “done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations and for the abolition or reduction of standing armies as well as for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”
Francesca Albanese [who is a nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize] has forcefully and unwaveringly worked against Israel’s full-scale war on the occupied Palestinian territories, in particular Israel´s ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people.
She has confronted Israel’s systematic war crimes and crimes against humanity in a truly global outreach.
Further, she has brought governments, international organisations and people’s groups together to underline the responsibility of the world at large to act and to stop arming, enabling, and profiting from Israel’s ongoing criminal actions.
But first of all, Albanese has lifted up the very core of the United Nations’ Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide for all member states to act to prevent and punish those who are perpetrating, complicit in and profiting from these atrocious crimes, and not merely to passively await a possible future verdict in international courts.
Francesca Albanese has proven herself to be an exceptionally worthy and true “champion for peace.”
The award consists of a diploma with a print by Mai-Bente Bonnevie, titled “Gaza” and a cheque for Euro 10,000. A prize ceremony will be held at a later date. Ms Albanese has informed Lay Down Your Arms that she will donate the prize money to a charity that she will announce at a later date.
Print of an artwork by Mai-Bente Bonnevie. (Lay Down Your Arms)
Lay Down Your Arms
Lay Down Your Arms is a Scandinavian peace organisation established by the late life-long peace activist and lawyer Fredrik Heffermehl to encourage work against war and armament. Lay Down Your Arms is active in organising peace conferences and highlights ways to wage peace by establishing The Lay Down Your Arms Peace Prize, an annual award to honour a “champion for peace.”
We aim to draw people’s attention to a candidate who stands out in her or his pursuit of peace, in line with the will of Alfred Nobel, the founder of the Nobel Peace Prize.
Bertha von Suttner, awarded the Nobel Peace prize of 1905. (Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain)
Like Alfred Nobel, we have been encouraged by the most prominent peace activist of his time, Countess Bertha von Suttner, who inspired Nobel with her seminal book Lay Down Your Arms. They showed us that an increasing militarisation is an ominous sign of a mismanaged world.
We hold that improved, global political transparency, international cooperation and
diplomacy, disarmament, and the abolition of both weapons and military solutions to conflicts are the only acceptable ways forward for our world.
The Lay Down Your Arms Board
Erni Friholt
Ola Friholt
Tomas Magnusson, Co-chair
John Y. Jones, Co-Chair
Jan Oberg
Contact Sweden
+46 708293197
tomas.magnusson1984@gmail.com
Contact Norway
+47 93039520
jones@networkers.org
More information at Laydownyourarms.today
This is a press release from the TFF Transnational Foundation.
Israel is doing to the world and America what Nazi Germany couldn’t do in the 1930’s: Destroy democracy and free speech by equating anti-genocide protests with antisemitism.
Francesca should get the Nobel Peace award, also.
It is so heartening to have Francesca Albanese awarded this prize in a season where the Nobel has once again shamed itself beyond repair. It would be enormously heartening at any time of course, but this timing is superb.
francesca albanese deserves my/our highest respect
for her courage, for her straightforwardness and her
undeterred perseverance in her endeavor for peace,
accountability, justice and human dignity [not just]
in west asia!
quoted from “lay down your arms”, no date indicated, alas:
“Today the [nobel peace] prize is in the hands of its political opponents.
We wish to use legal means to get back the money that once was given
to the cause of peace by demilitarization of international relations.”
does that mean they would actually ask money back
from people who once received the prize unjustly?
even trying to just retrieve administrative cost incurred
in connection with several award ceremonies seems futile.
[but maybe i misread that part of their mission statement?]
quite irrespective of that:
THANK YOU so much, francesca albanese, for showing us
what standing up to corrupt fact twisters, insatiable smear
campaigners, violent war profiteers and their ilk can look like!
__________________________
I agree, if the Nobel prize was not awarded by a group of sycophants from a vassal of the USA (Norway), we would have people like the honorable Francesca Albanese winning the award. Instead the prize has become a butt of sarcastic jokes. The most obvious warmongers who won the prize were Kissinger and Obama, but there are others.
The winner this year is a likely CIA asset who calls for violence, sanctions and regime change against her own country. And I recall Bernard Sanders referring to Hugo Chavez as a “dead communist dictator”. That was a bald-faced lie: the Carter Center, UN and EU observers called Venezuela elections amongst the “cleanest” in the world.
It is a certainty that there are millions of souls worldwide who would surely like to nominate Francesca Albanese for the not so ‘Nobel’ peace prize, given the foundations upon which Alfred Noble got to become a philanthropist.
Would she accept it were it awarded to her?
Le Duc Tho of North Vietnam honorably did the right thing by voluntarily turning down the award in 1973 rather than share it with the duplicitous war criminal, U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.
Tho refused to accept the award on the grounds that true peace had not yet been achieved in his country, as fighting had continued despite the accords.
Perhaps Trump will order the awards ceremony removed ‘lock’ ‘stock’ and ‘barrels’ to Gaza.
We’re all drowning in the driveling dribble of Trumps desire to deliver yet another disingenuous speech devoid of depth; in my humble opinion!
She has been nominated.
Now we know what a bought and paid for scam and sham the prize really is!
What the award speaks volumes for is that Venezuela is more open to the idea of democracy than is the US