Breaking with tradition, nearly all ambassadors of the world's nuclear powers will not attend this year's Nobel Peace Prize ceremony which honours efforts to ban atomic weapons, the Nobel Institute said Thursday. "We are disappointed that the ambassadors from the United Kingdom, the United States and France won't be there," the head of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) Beatrice Fihn told AFP.
"They claim to be committed to a world without nuclear weapons, and they should be celebrating civil society's work on the issue," she said, regretting their "defensive" position, yet noting that it "shows that this treaty and the campaign is already having an impact on them". The Peace Prize was awarded on October 6 to ICAN, a coalition of non-governmental organisations lobbying for a historic treaty banning atomic weapons, which was signed in July by 122 countries though none of the nuclear powers.
ICAN will formally receive its prize at a lavish ceremony in Oslo on December 10. During a meeting in the Norwegian capital last week, the United States, France and Britain all informed the Nobel Institute of their joint decision to be represented by their embassy's second-in-charge. "They clearly received instructions to express their reservations towards ICAN and the global treaty" to ban weapons of mass destruction, the head of the Nobel Institute, Olav Njolstad, told AFP.
Of the nine countries with nuclear weapons capabilities, Russia and Israel, an unofficial nuclear nation, will be the only ones sending their ambassadors to the ceremony. "In principle, we like all embassies in Oslo to send their highest representative but we have to accept that, sometimes, for political reasons, various countries abstain from participating or choose to do so at a lower level," Njolstad said.
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