OPINION:
The Nobel Peace Prize has a serious problem.
Beyond occasional questionable choices, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has become increasingly ideological, rewarding fashionable political causes and the international establishment’s preferred personalities while overlooking those who have sacrificed their freedom — and sometimes their lives — fighting tyranny.
This is particularly evident in the struggles against European colonialism, communist totalitarianism and genocidal Islamist extremism.
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The committee has made admirable choices. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Dalai Lama and Liu Xiaobo deserved recognition. These exceptions make the committee’s conspicuous omissions harder to explain.
None is more glaring than Mahatma Gandhi. The man whose nonviolent resistance helped bring the British Empire to its knees was nominated five times from 1937 to 1948. He never won.
When Gandhi was assassinated in January 1948, the committee withheld the prize, declaring that there was no suitable living candidate that year.
Yet posthumous Nobel Prizes were not formally prohibited until 1974. Indeed, in 1961, the committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize posthumously to Dag Hammarskjold, the Swedish diplomat and United Nations secretary-general.
So a deceased European international civil servant could receive the prize, but the greatest champion of nonviolent resistance to European imperialism could not.
The rules did not prevent the committee from honoring Gandhi; the committee itself did.
Now consider former President Obama.
In 2009, Mr. Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize less than nine months after taking office. He had delivered impressive speeches and promised international cooperation, but what had he accomplished?
The committee rewarded him for what it hoped he would do rather than what he had done.
Gandhi spent decades challenging an empire and received nothing. Mr. Obama had barely begun his presidency when he received the prize.
One was judged after a lifetime of sacrifice. The other was rewarded based on expectations.
That contrast speaks volumes.
The committee’s discomfort with European colonialism deserves scrutiny. Yes, it honored anti-apartheid leaders Albert Luthuli, Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela, but it has rarely confronted European imperial domination with comparable moral clarity.
In 1996, it honored Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo and Jose Ramos-Horta for their efforts toward peace in East Timor. Yet its citation spoke of a conflict rather than confronting Portuguese colonialism and Indonesia’s subsequent occupation.
Notice the language. Colonial domination becomes a conflict. Fighting for national independence becomes a peace process. Historical responsibility disappears into diplomatic euphemism.
The same selective moral vision appears in its treatment of communist totalitarianism.
The committee deserves credit for honoring the Dalai Lama in 1989 and Liu Xiaobo in 2010, despite Beijing’s fury.
Why stop there?
What about the Tiananmen Mothers, the anonymous Tank Man, numerous brave Chinese dissidents of unfathomable courage facing the brutal Beijing regime, China’s many prisoners of conscience and Hong Kong’s democracy protesters?
What about Taiwan’s transformative leaders, who fought authoritarianism and brought democracy to their country?
These are not people making fashionable speeches at international conferences. Many have paid for their convictions with imprisonment, persecution, exile or death.
Yet their recognition remains limited.
The 2026 award to former U.N. human rights chief Navi Pillay brings these contradictions into focus. Ms. Pillay has a distinguished record in international criminal justice and the struggle against apartheid, but her selection raises questions about the Nobel establishment’s political priorities.
She chaired a U.N. commission that accused Israel of genocide in the Gaza Strip, a conclusion that Israel strongly rejects.
What about the murderous antisemitism of Hamas and other Islamist extremist movements? The Oct. 7, 2023, atrocities demonstrated that genocidal antisemitism remains a deadly threat.
Why should criticism of Israel receive greater prominence than confronting those advocating its destruction?
These abuses all demand scrutiny. One does not excuse another.
Ms. Pillay’s record toward communist China also deserves examination. As the top U.N. human rights official, she was conspicuously absent from Liu Xiaobo’s 2010 Nobel ceremony, citing a scheduling technicality as her cowardly excuse.
More recently, allegations have surfaced that her office gave Chinese authorities the names of dissidents. These allegations require careful examination, but they underscore long-standing concerns about the international human rights establishment’s dealings with Beijing.
The Nobel Committee risks acquiring and inheriting the credibility problems of the U.N. Human Rights Council, where authoritarian governments such as China, North Korea, Iran and Cuba have held seats despite their records and ferocious defense of their own egregious human rights violations.
What does it say about international human rights governance when governments accused of crushing fundamental freedoms participate in judging others? The Norwegian Nobel Committee decided to reward the top U.N. human rights official with its prestigious prize.
Human rights cannot be universal when their application depends on the perpetrator’s political identity.
Here lies the Nobel Peace Prize’s fundamental problem. Diplomatic engagement becomes an achievement in itself. Institutional prestige substitutes for personal courage. Political aspirations are rewarded as accomplished facts.
Meanwhile, those confronting oppression remain in the shadows.
The result is an empire-shaped blind spot, compounded by inconsistent recognition of struggles against communist dictatorship and antisemitic extremism.
The Nobel Peace Prize was never intended as a certificate of ideological approval from Europe’s political establishment. It was meant to recognize extraordinary contributions to peace.
Still, peace cannot be separated from freedom. There is no lasting peace in a prison state, no genuine reconciliation under totalitarian coercion and no moral equivalence between those peacefully demanding liberty and those imprisoning them.
Gandhi never needed the Nobel Prize to secure his place in history. Neither do Chinese dissidents resisting communist tyranny nor Israeli citizens defending themselves against terrorism.
Their moral stature tells us more about the committee’s limitations than the committee’s decisions tell us about them.
The Nobel Peace Prize should honor those who risk their freedom to bring peace to the oppressed, not merely those who enjoy the privilege of selectively defining peace for everyone else.
• Miles Yu is the director of the China Center at the Hudson Institute. His “Red Horizon” column appears every other Tuesday in The Washington Times. He can be reached at mmilesyu@gmail.com.
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