OSLO (Reuters)
- Pakistani teenager Malala Yousafzai, who was shot in the head by the
Taliban in 2012 for advocating girls' right to education, and Indian
children's right activist Kailash Satyarthi won the 2014 Nobel Peace
Prize on Friday.
Yousafzai, aged 17, becomes the youngest Nobel Prize winner by far.
Satyarthi,
60, and Yousafzai were picked for their struggle against the oppression
of children and young people, and for the right of all children to
education, the Norwegian Nobel Committee said.
The
award was made at a time when hostilities have broken out between India
and Pakistan along the border of the disputed, mainly Muslim region of
Kashmir - the worst fighting between the nuclear-armed rivals in more
than a decade.
"The Nobel
Committee regards it as an important point for a Hindu and a Muslim, an
Indian and a Pakistani, to join in a common struggle for education and
against extremism," said Thorbjoern Jagland, the head of the Norwegian
Nobel Committee.
Yousafzai
was attacked in 2012 on a school bus in the Swat Valley in northwest
Pakistan by masked gunmen as a punishment for a blog that she started
writing for the BBC's Urdu service as an 11-year-old to campaign against
the Taliban's efforts to deny women an education.
Unable
to return to Pakistan after her recovery, Yousafzai moved to Britain,
setting up the Malala Fund and supporting local education advocacy
groups with a focus on Pakistan, Nigeria, Jordan, Syria and Kenya.
Satyarthi,
who gave up a career as an electrical engineer in 1980 to campaign
against child labor, has headed various forms of peaceful protests and
demonstrations, focusing on the exploitation of children for financial
gain.
"It's an honor to all
those children still suffering in slavery, bonded labor and
trafficking," Satyarthi told TV news channel CNN-IBN after learning he
won the prize.
In a recent
editorial, Satyarthi said that data from non-government organizations
indicated that child laborers could number 60 million in India or 6
percent of the total population.
"Children
are employed not just because of parental poverty, illiteracy,
ignorance, failure of development and education programs, but quite
essentially due to the fact that employers benefit immensely from child
labor as children come across as the cheapest option, sometimes working
even for free," he wrote.
Children are employed illegally and companies use the financial gain to bribe officials, creating a vicious cycle, he argued.
Yousafzai
last year addressed the U.N. Youth Assembly in an event
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called "Malala Day". This year she
traveled to Nigeria to demand the release of 200 schoolgirls kidnapped
by the Islamist group Boko Haram.
"To
the girls of Nigeria and across Africa, and all over the world, I want
to say: don't let anyone tell you that you are weaker than or less than
anything," she said in a speech.
"You are not less than a boy,"
Yousafzai said. "You are not less than a child from a richer or more
powerful country. You are the future of your country. You are going to
build it strong. It is you who can lead the charge."The prize, worth about $1.1 million, will be presented in Oslo on Dec. 10, the anniversary of the death of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, who founded the award in his 1895 will.
The previous youngest winner was Australian-born British scientist Lawrence Bragg, who was 25 when he shared the Physics Prize with his father in 1915
(Reporting
by Balazs Koranyi, Gwladys Fouche, Terje Solsvik and Alister Doyle,
Additional reporting by Douglas Busvine and John Chalmers; Editing by
Angus MacSwan; Editing by Angus MacSwan) this blog was scorned from www.yahoo.com