Malala Yousafzai & Kailash Satyarthi Are Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize

Reaching across gulfs of age, gender, faith, nationality and even international celebrity, the Norwegian Nobel Committee on Friday awarded the 2014 peace prize to Malala Yousafzai of Pakistan and Kailash Satyarthi of India, joining a teenage Pakistani known around the world with a 60-year-old Indian veteran of campaigns on behalf of children.

The awards, announced in Oslo by Thorbjorn Jagland, the committee’s chairman, were in acknowledgment of their work in helping to promote universal schooling and in protecting children worldwide from abuse and exploitation.

Pointedly, Mr. Jagland said, “The Nobel Committee regards it as an important point for a Hindu and a Muslim, an Indian and a Pakistani, to join in a common struggle for education and against extremism.” Ms. Yousafzai is 17 while Mr. Satyarthi is 60.

“Children must go to school and not be financially exploited,” Mr. Jagland said, adding: "It is a prerequisite for peaceful global development that the rights of children and young people be respected. In conflict-ridden areas in particular, the violation of children leads to the continuation of violence from generation to generation.”

“Showing great personal courage, Kailash Satyarthi, maintaining Gandhi’s tradition, has headed various forms of protests and demonstrations, all peaceful, focusing on the grave exploitation of children for financial gain,” Mr. Jagland said. “He has also contributed to the development of important international conventions on children’s rights.”

Despite his works, Mr. Satyarthi is not nearly so widely known as Ms. Yousafzai, who was shot in the head by the Taliban in 2012 for her campaigning on behalf of girls’ education in the Swat Valley of Pakistan. She was 15 at the time. Since then she has become a global emblem of her struggle, celebrated on television and through her own memoir.

She “has already fought for several years for the right of girls to education, and has shown by example that children and young people, too, can contribute to improving their own situations,” Mr. Jagland said. “This she has done under the most dangerous circumstances. Through her heroic struggle she has become a leading spokesperson for girls’ rights to education.”

The prize came after a year in which war has spread into Europe with fighting in eastern Ukraine, and across frontiers in the Middle East after the Sunni militant Islamic State pushed from Syria into Iraq in June.

For the previous two years, the prize had been awarded to international bodies: the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in 2013 and the European Union in 2012.

The winner was chosen from 278 candidates, 47 of them of organizations, the highest overall number of candidates since the prize was first awarded in 1901. The previous record was 259 in 2013, according to the Oslo-based committee, which traditionally makes its final choice at the last minute and seeks unanimity.

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