UK and Ireland partners congratulate 2024 Nobel Peace Prize winner

Posted: 13th October 2024

On hearing the news that the Japanese Hibakusha survivor network Nihon Hidankyo (No More Hibakusha) has been awarded this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, NFLA and Mayors for Peace Chapter Secretary Richard Outram lost no time in sending the worthy winners our congratulations.

The Nobel Peace Prize Committee made their customary announcement on 11 October, two months before the formal award ceremony takes place in Oslo.

Founded on August 10, 1956, Nihon Hidankyo is the only Japanese national organisation of A-bomb survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Hibakusha). It has branches in all 47 Japanese prefectures, thus representing almost all organized Hibakusha. Impressively, its officials and members are all Hibakusha. Although most Hibakusha live in Japan, several thousand more live in Korea and in other parts of the world.

The website states that the organisation’s main objectives are:

1) The prevention of nuclear war and the elimination of nuclear weapons, including the signing of an international agreement for a total ban and the elimination of nuclear weapons. The convening of an international conference to reach this goal is also part of Hidankyo’s basic demand.

2) State compensation for the A-bomb damages. The state responsibility of having launched the war, which led to the damage by the atomic bombing, should be acknowledged, and the state compensation provided.

3) Improvement of the current policies and measures on the protection and assistance for the Hibakusha.

Although the Nihon Hidankyo website records that in March 2016 there were 174,080 Hibakusha living in Japan, since that time these numbers are fast dwindling as many are in their eighties or above. Doubtless this factor, and the fact that the organisation will be the holder of the current Nobel Peace Prize throughout 2025 when the world remembers and commemorates the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombings, have played their part in their worthy selection as this year’s winners.

More information can be found on the organisation’s website:

https://www.ne.jp/asahi/hidankyo/nihon/english/index.html

The text of the letter of congratulation follows.

Ends://..For more information, please contact NFLA and Mayors for Peace Chapter Secretary Richard Outram by email to [email protected] or mobile +44 (0)7583 097793

The text of the letter of congratulations (which was also sent in Japanese):

11 October 2024

FAO Co-Chairpersons Terumi TANAKA, Shigemitsu TANAKA and Toshiyuki MIMAKI

And 

Secretary General Sueichi KIDO

C/o Nihon Hidankyo,

(Japanese Confederation of A-Bomb and H-Bomb Sufferers Organisations)

Dear Colleagues and, if you will permit, Friends,

I have the honour to be the Secretary of the UK/Ireland Nuclear Free Local Authorities and the UK and Ireland Chapter of Mayors for Peace.

The Secretariat of both organisations is based in the great Northern English city of Manchester, which was the first city in the world to declare itself nuclear free on November 5, 1980, and which in autumn 1981 hosted a conference of like-minded UK local authorities which together resolved to form the Nuclear Free Local Authorities network. Manchester also became an early member of Mayors for Peace and is now a Vice-Presidential city in an organisation now numbering 8,500 local authority members. 

On this momentous day, I wish to convey to you the heartfelt and sincere congratulations of our member authorities, which together number around 125 in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland, at the news that your efforts to achieve a nuclear weapon free world have finally been properly recognised and rewarded with the announcement that Nihon Hidankyo will be awarded the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize.

I had the great honour to meet your members when joining them in Hiroshima on the 2nd anniversary of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons entering international law on 22 Jan 2023. In the afternoon, I supported them in a petition drive they were holding at the Motoyasu-bashi Bridge and after dark I joined them at the A-bomb Dome in an incredibly powerful and moving candlelit vigil calling for peace in Ukraine and a nuclear weapon free world [see below – the Nuclear Weapons are Banned banner in red at the back is me. I took it to Japan for this purpose].

Despite the advanced age and increasing ill-health of your members, their indomitable spirit and steadfast courage over decades in representing the collective voice of the Hibakusha by highlighting their suffering and their hopes that a nuclear weapon free world is both possible and necessary has been an enduring inspiration to generations of peace activists.

You have our salute and our promise that as the years roll by those anti-nuclear activists worldwide who follow you in that struggle will never rest, spurred by your example until we see the dismantlement of the last nuclear weapon and the end of the threat of nuclear war.

Let there be No More Hibakusha!

Yours in solidarity and in peace,  

Richard Outram, BA (Hons),

Secretary, UK/Ireland Nuclear Free Local Authorities and 

Secretary, UK/Ireland Mayors for Peace Chapter,

C/o City Policy, Manchester City Council