MOSCOW, Oct 17 -- Senior Russian lawmaker Vyacheslav Volodyn said on Sunday that indiscriminate awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize could tarnish its image and suggested a pathway for taking the reward away.
"Confidence in it could be restored if there were a way to take the prize away in cases where crimes, abuse of human rights and freedoms were proven," he said on social media as reported by Sputnik.
Volodyn, who chairs the lower house of the Russian parliament, said the prize was undermined by lack of clarity on how it is awarded, unlike Nobel Prizes for Chemistry, Physics or Medicine.
The committee has been criticised for bestowing the prize on former US President Barack Obama before he was tested in office and on Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi, who went on to oversee persecution of an ethnic minority during her five-year stint in power.
This year, the prize was awarded to Maria Ressa, co-founder of the Philippine news website Rappler, and Dmitry Muratov, the editor-in-chief of Russia's Novaya Gazeta newspaper, "for their efforts to safeguard freedom of expression."
-- BERNAMA
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