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
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