After international uproar over how Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Corina Machado had given her gold Nobel medal to US President Donald Trump, the Norwegian Nobel Institute finally issued a statement on the controversy. Machado remains the Nobel Peace Prize winner (called a “laureate”), but it was her choice to give away her medal.
Peace Prize winner Maria Corina Machado outside the Nobel Institute in Oslo last month, with Nobel Institute director Kristian Berg Harpviken (right) and the leader of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Jørgen Watne Frydnes. PHOTO: © Nobel Prize Outreach – Jo Straube
The Peace Prize itself can’t be passed on from its winner to someone else, confirmed Kristian Berg Harpviken, director of the Nobel Institute in Oslo. “But the medal can be given away,” he said on state broadcaster NRK’s evening talkshow Dagsnytt 18. “That’s what she has given away.”
That doesn’t mean Trump now has a Nobel medal that makes him a winner. On the contrary, wrote the institute on its website late Friday afternoon: “The Nobel Prize and the Laureate are inseparable.” (external link to the Norwegian Nobel Institute’s website).
“Even if the medal or diploma later comes into someone else’s possession, this does not alter who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize,” wrote the institute. “A laureate cannot share the prize with others, nor transer it once it has been announced. A Nobel Peace Prize can never be revoked.”
Prize winners are publicly presented with what the institute called “two central symbols” of the Nobel Peace Prize during the annual awards ceremony in December:a gold medal and a diploma. Prize money (currently equal to 11 million Swedish kroner) is awarded separately.
Harpviken was finally speaking for the first time late Friday after Machado’s meeting with Trump grabbed lots of international headlines because she controversially gave him her 18-karat gold Nobel medal.
“The Peace Prize can’t be given away, but the medal can,” Harpviken told Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK) when appearing on the state broadcaster’s evening news talk show Dagsnytt 18. “That’s what she has given away.”
Harpviken noted that it’s far from the first time Nobel prize winners have given away their medals. One of the more notable donations was when Dmitry Muratov, a Russian journalist among those receiviing the Peace Prize in 2021, auctioned off his medal for USD 103.5 million in June 2022, four months after Russia had invaded Ukraine. The entire sum went to care for Ukrainian refugee children.
Another case was when controversial Norwegian author Knut Hamsun gave his gold medal from winning the Nobel Prize in literature to Germany’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels in 1943, even though Nazi Germany was occupying Norway at the time during World War II. Goebbels thanked Hamsun, but the gold medal ended up being lost forever after Goebbels committed suicide when Nazi Germany lost power in 1945.
NewsinEnglish.no/Nina Berglund