The IAEA and its Director General, Mohamed ElBaradei, are among candidates for the prestigious Nobel Peace Prize. Dr. ElBaradei also is among favoured nominees for this year's Sakharov Human Rights Prize awarded by the European Parliament.
For the Nobel Prize, the decision on this year's winner will be announced 10 October by the chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Ole Danbolt Mjøs. The Peace Prize is awarded annually at a ceremony on 10 December, the day on which Alfred Nobel died in 1896. Alfred Nobel was a Swedish scientist who in 1867 patented a special type of nitroglycerine that he called dynamite. He left the bulk of his rich estate to a fund administered by the Nobel Foundation.
Sakharov Prize. Each year, the European Parliament honours an individual or organisation with its human rights prize for freedom of thought. The prize is named after Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet dissident, nuclear physicist and Nobel Peace Prize winner. Dr. ElBaradei is nominated jointly for the Prize with Hans Blix, who formerly headed the IAEA and the United Nations Monitoring and Verification Commission (UNMOVIC), and Sergio Vieira de Melio, the late UN special representative for Iraq.
The winner of the Sakharov Prize will be chosen by the European Parliament's party leaders on 16 October and presented in Strasbourg in December.
Japan Foundation Peace Award. In July, the Goi Peace Foundation in Japan presented the IAEA with a peace award for its contributions to world peace and security. The award was presented during a ceremony 10 July at IAEA headquarters in Vienna.
Throughout the past year, the work of the IAEA and Dr. ElBaradei has been widely recognized through the Agency's leading international role in inspections of nuclear programmes in Iraq and other countries.