Unfortunately, the 58-year-old is not currently in Norway and will not be on stage at the award ceremony, said the director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute.Image: keystone
Dec 10, 2025, 07:51Dec 10, 2025, 08:03
This year’s Nobel Peace Prize ceremony will take place without the actual winner. Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado will not attend today’s awards ceremony at Oslo City Hall after threats from her country’s authoritarian leadership.
Unfortunately, the 58-year-old is not currently in Norway and will not be on stage at the award ceremony, said the director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute, Kristian Berg Harpviken, to radio station NRK. Instead, her daughter will receive the Nobel Prize and also give a speech that her mother wrote. He doesn’t know where Machado is.
Commitment to democracy in Venezuela
The Norwegian Nobel Committee announced in October that Machado, who lives in a secret location inside Venezuela, would be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize this year. The committee awarded her the prestigious prize “for her tireless commitment to the democratic rights of the Venezuelan people and for her fight for a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.”
The 58-year-old then dedicated the award to “the suffering people of Venezuela” and to US President Donald Trump for his support of the Venezuelan opposition. Venezuela’s authoritarian President Nicolás Maduro then indirectly referred to her as a “demonic witch” – he usually doesn’t mention her name.
Machado is considered a unifying force in the opposition in Venezuela and a determined opponent of Maduro, who has ruled in an authoritarian manner since 2013. She tried to run for president in her country in 2023, but was excluded from the election the following year because of alleged irregularities. Critics accuse Maduro of systematic election manipulation.
High personal risk
Machado went into hiding within her country some time ago out of concern for her safety. The Nobel Committee had previously assumed that she could come to Oslo for the prize ceremony. She herself had assured that she would do everything she could to be able to travel to the Norwegian capital for the greatest honor of her life.
However, Venezuelan prosecutors had threatened to consider Machado a fugitive if she left the country due to various investigations against her. She would potentially face arrest, an entry ban, or worse if she returned to Venezuela from Oslo.
“I have been accused of every crime imaginable, including terrorism,” Machado said in a recent NRK interview. “The regime has become very clear. Maduro said that if they caught me they would kill me.”
Prevented Nobel Prize winners absolute exception
With the Nobel Prizes, which have been awarded since 1901, it is extremely rare that prize winners are unable to receive their awards in person. Five Nobel Peace Prize winners in the history of the prize were denied this because they were imprisoned in their home countries at the time of their award.
They included the German journalist Carl von Ossietzky in 1935, the Myanmar politician Aung San Suu Kyi in 1991, the Chinese human rights activist Liu Xiaobo in 2010 and, most recently, the Belarusian lawyer Ales Bjaljazki in 2022 and the Iranian human rights activist Narges Mohammadi in 2023.
In 1973, the Vietnamese politician Le Duc Tho was the only Nobel Peace Prize winner to date to voluntarily reject the prize awarded to him. At the time, he was honored together with US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and justified his rejection of the prize by saying that there was still no peace in Vietnam.
The Nobel Peace Prize is traditionally presented on December 10th in Oslo City Hall – the ceremony takes place today at 1 p.m. On the same day, the anniversary of the death of dynamite inventor and prize founder Alfred Nobel (1833-1896), all other Nobel Prizes in the other categories of medicine, physics, chemistry, literature and economics will be presented in Stockholm. This year, the prizes are worth eleven million Swedish crowns (around one million euros) per category. (sda/dpa)
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