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Iran Deal Architects Fail to Win Nobel Prize for Nuclear Disarmament

The Nobel committee has warned of a rising risk of nuclear war and called on the world’s powers to start serious disarmament talks, as it awarded the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) on Friday.

The decision to select the ICAN, an international campaign group with a relatively low profile, was unexpected in a year when the architects of the 2015 nuclear deal between six world powers and Iran were tipped as favorites for the award, Reuters reported.

ICAN describes itself as a coalition of grassroots non-government groups, which operates in more than 100 nations. It began in Australia and was officially launched in Vienna in 2007.

“We live in a world where the risk of nuclear weapons being used is greater than it has been for a long time,” said Berit Reiss-Andersen, the leader of the Norwegian Nobel Committee. “Some states are modernizing their nuclear arsenals, and there is a real danger that more countries will try to procure nuclear weapons, as exemplified by North Korea,” he added.

The Iran deal, which United States President Trump has repeatedly described as “the worst deal ever negotiated,” is collapsing under its own weight as the White House is expected to decertify Iran’s compliance, a step towards potentially dismantling the accord.

Some experts have suggested that egregious human rights violations in Iran were the reason behind the Nobel committee’s reluctance to award the Nobel Prize to the architects of the deal.

“I think the committee has thought about the human rights situation in Iran. It would have been difficult to explain the prize even though it has a favorable view of the Iran deal,” Asle Sveen, a historian of the Nobel Peace Prize, told Reuters.

The only Iranian winner of the Nobel Prize so far, 2003 laureate Shirin Ebadi, a lawyer and human rights campaigner, is living in exile. Political pressure forced Ms. Ebadi to leave Iran, and she now resides in Switzerland.

On Wednesday, a member of the Iranian negotiating team that struck the 2015 nuclear accord was convicted of espionage and sentenced by an Iranian court to five years in prison.

Abdolrasoul Dorri Esfahani has dual Iranian-Canadian citizenship. The United Nations recently criticized the Islamic Republic for detaining dual-nationals, calling it an “emerging pattern” since the nuclear deal was signed.

[Photo: ProtoplasmaKid/Wikimedia Commons]