The Norwegian Nobel Committee, in its 101 years of existence has awarded the Nobel Peace Prize not only to United Nations agencies and staff eight times-we look at the eight laureates associated with the United Nations, including the Organization itself, in following pages-it has also honoured a number of individuals and organizations working indirectly with the United Nations or its precursor, the League of Nations.
Before 1914, the Nobel Committee credited, in particular, efforts at legislation and arbitration leading to peace, especially in connection with the Hague Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907, and it awarded the Prize to a number of representatives of popular peace movements and international legal tradition, such as Frederic Passy of France (1901), one of the principal founders of the Inter-Parliamentary Union, and former Belgian Prime Minister August Beernaert (1909), a member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague.
In the period between the two world wars, many of the laureates were closely associated with the League of Nations. In 1919, the Peace Prize was awarded to United States President Woodrow Wilson for his crucial role in establishing the League; the following year it went to Leon Bourgeois of France, known as its "spiritual father". Perhaps no one was more closely identified with the League of Nations than one of its architects, Lord Robert Cecil of the United Kingdom, who received the Prize in 1937, and participated in 1946 in the final meetings of the League at Geneva, ending his speech with, "The League is dead; long live the United Nations!" He remained active in supporting international efforts for peace through his honorary life presidency of the United Nations Association.
During the world wars, the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize was suspended, except to recognize (1917 and 1944) the efforts of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to assist wounded combatants, prisoners of war and refugees. This emphasis on the humanitarian aspects of peace was evident from the beginning: as in 1901, the Norwegian Nobel Committee had decided to share the first Peace Prize between Frederic Passy and Henri Dunant of Switzerland, founder of ICRC and originator of the 1864 Geneva Convention. In 1922, Fridtjof Nansen of Norway, originator of the so-called "Nansen passports", was honoured for his work with refugees, and in 1938 the Prize went to the Nansen International Office for Refugees, founded following Fridtjof Nansen's death in 1930, as the successor of the first international agency dealing with refugees-the High Commission for Refugees, established by the League of Nations under the direction of Nansen in 1921.
In 1963, on the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Red Cross, the Prize was awarded jointly to two major arms of the Red Cross movement: the Swiss International Committee of the Red Cross and the International League of Red Cross Societies. Following the Second World War, the emphasis on arbitration and mediation in peace efforts shifted to arms control and disarmament, humanitarian assistance and increasingly to questions of human rights; a number of laureates were directly or indirectly involved with the United Nations. In 1945, former United States Secretary of State Cordell Hull received the Peace Prize in recognition of his prominent role as a senior member of the American delegation in the creation of the United Nations. In 1949, Lord Boyd Orr, a British scientist and founding Director-General of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN, was honoured for his efforts to employ scientific discoveries to "promote cooperation between nations".
In 1951, the Prize went to Leon Jouhaux of France, a leader in the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions who had helped found the International Labour Organization in 1919. Former Canadian Secretary of State Lester Bowles Pearson, who served as the President of the seventh session of the UN General Assembly, received the Peace Prize in 1957, primarily for his efforts to end the Suez conflict and resolve the Middle East question through the United Nations. The laureate who best represented the continuity between two great international political organizations of the twentieth century perhaps was Philip Noel-Baker of the United Kingdom. A long-time member of English Parliament, he participated in the formation, administration and legislative deliberations of the League of Nations and the United Nations. In the formative days of the UN, Noel-Baker was concerned with the selection of a site for the UN headquarters and with outlining the privileges, restrictions and responsibilities of UN staff members as a foundation of an international civil service.
In 1968, the Peace Prize went to René Cassin, President of the European Court for Human Rights and, as one of the foremost legal scholars, a principal drafter of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948. In 1974, the Peace Prize went to Sean MacBride of Ireland, who founded in 1961 the non-governmental human rights organization Amnesty International, which also received the Prize in 1977. Elected to the Office of United Nations Commissioner for Namibia by the UN General Assembly, MacBride served as Commissioner, with rank of Assistant Secretary-General, from 1973 to 1977. In 1982, the Nobel Peace Prize went jointly to Alva Myrdal of Sweden and Alfonso Garcia Robles of Mexico for their efforts in disarmament, much of which was done under various UN negotiations.
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