06 October 2017•Update: 07 October 2017
By Ilker Girit
ISTANBUL
The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) has won the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize, the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced Friday.
In a statement, the committee said the Geneva-based anti-nuclear weapons group had been awarded for drawing “attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons and for its ground-breaking efforts to achieve a treaty-based prohibition of such weapons".
The Norwegian Nobel Committee also said ICAN "has been the leading civil society actor in the endeavor to achieve a prohibition of nuclear weapons under international law".
The group wrote on Twitter: "It’s a great to have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of our role in achieving #nuclearban."
ICAN is a global civil society coalition of non-governmental organizations from over 100 countries working for the prohibition of nuclear weapons.
The group -- with over 460 partner organizations -- has been "a driving force" on countries' promises to eliminate nuclear weapons in line with UN accords.
The Nobel committee said despite international bans on chemical and biological weapons, nuclear weapons "are even more destructive, but have not yet been made the object of a similar international legal prohibition.
"Through its work, ICAN has helped to fill this legal gap. An important argument in the rationale for prohibiting nuclear weapons is the unacceptable human suffering that a nuclear war will cause".
‘No one we can trust with nukes’
Last year, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos won the Nobel Peace Prize "for his resolute efforts to bring the country's more than 50-year-long civil war to an end".
About winning the prize, ICAN Executive Director Beatrice Fihn told reporters in Geneva, "Just before the announcement, we got a phone call. It was really hard to believe it at first. We thought it was a prank."
On the heated nuclear rhetoric between the U.S. and North Korea, she said, "Threatening to use nuclear weapons to totally destroy an entire country, test nuclear weapons, and all these activities completely unacceptable and also now illegal with new treaties. North Korea and U.S. should respect that and refrain from such behavior."
When asked about a tweet posted two days before her group won the prize saying, "Trump is a moron," Fihn said she regretted it, but added, "I think that the election of President Donald Trump has made a lot of people very uncomfortable with the fact that he alone can authorize the use of nuclear weapons."
"There is no one we can trust with the ability to destroy the entire world."
*Fatih Erel in Geneva contributed to this story.
