Tunisian quartet wins 2015 Nobel peace prize

Tunisian quartet wins 2015 Nobel peace prize

OSLO (Norway): The Tunisian national dialogue quartet, a coalition of civil society organisations, has won the 2015 Nobel peace prize, Nobel Committee announced today, 09^th October 2015.

Kaci Kullmann Five, the newly appointed chairman of the Norwegian Nobel committee, said the quartet had formed an alternative peaceful political process in 2013 when the country was on the brink of civil war and subsequently guaranteed fundamental rights for the entire population.

Committee says prize awarded for quartet’s decisive contribution to the building of a pluralistic democracy in Tunisia in the wake of the 2011 Jasmine Revolution.

The peace prize is the only one of the six Nobels to be announced in Oslo.

The five-member committee had released no hints ahead of the announcement as to which of the 273 nominees - 205 people and 68 organisations - would win.

The Arab Spring began in Tunisia with protests that brought down the government of long-time dictator Zine Abedine Ben Ali in January 2011 but the country fell into crisis in the following years. The Nobel committee said the quartet had made a “decisive contribution to the building of a pluralistic democracy in Tunisia” at time of political assassinations and widespread social unrest.

“An essential factor for the culmination of the revolution in Tunisia in peaceful, democratic elections last autumn was the effort made by the quartet to support the work of the constituent assembly and to secure approval of the constitutional process among the Tunisian population at large,” the committee said.

“The quartet paved the way for a peaceful dialogue between the citizens, the political parties and the authorities and helped to find consensus-based solutions to a wide range of challenges across political and religious divides. The broad-based national dialogue that the quartet succeeded in establishing countered the spread of violence in Tunisia and its function is therefore comparable to that of the peace congresses to which Alfred Nobel refers in his will.”

The quartet is comprised four key organisations in Tunisian civil society: the Tunisian General Labour Union, the Tunisian Confederation of Industry, Trade and Handicrafts, the Tunisian Human Rights League and the Tunisian Order of Lawyers.