Apparently, the Nobel Peace Prize is not revocable, or returnable.
Olav Njolstad, head of the Norwegian Nobel Institute, in response to calls to strip Myanmar’s Aung Sang Suu Kyi’s prize, said that neither the will of prize founder Alfred Nobel nor the Nobel Foundation’s rules provide for the possibility of withdrawing the honour from laureates.
"It is not possible to strip a Nobel Peace Prize laureate of his or her award once bestowed," Njolstad wrote. "None of the prize awarding committees in Stockholm and Oslo has ever considered revoking a prize after it has been awarded."
(This was in relation to the online petition signed by more than 386,000 people on Change.org is calling for Suu Kyi to be stripped of her Peace Prize over the persecution of Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslim minority).
Source:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/09/08/nobel-institute-aung-sang-suu-kyi-cannot-stripped-prize/Further, a brief online check revealed other instances of such non-revocation:
Consider Ralph Bunche, the great American who won the prize in 1950. Working as a U.N. diplomat, Bunche had negotiated a series of armistice agreements between Israel and its Arab attackers. In short order, those agreements were shot to hell. But the prize to Bunche remained intact.
Henry Kissinger tried to return his Nobel. That is, he tried to return the gold medal, the diploma (or certificate), and the money. But, as the Nobel Peace Prize is not revokable, neither is it returnable.
He won in 1973 along with North Vietnam’s Le Duc Tho (who declined his share of the prize). They were being awarded for the Paris Agreement, a ceasefire inked in January 1973. Of course, North Vietnam violated the agreement with abandon. And when Saigon fell in April 1975, Kissinger said he felt “honor bound” to return his prize. He wrote to the committee in Oslo, explaining.
“I regret, more profoundly than I can ever express, the necessity for this letter. But the anguish and tragedy that have been inflicted upon millions who sought nothing more than the chance to live their own lives leave me no alternative.”
The committee said, Thanks all the same. The course of the war in no way reduced the committee’s “appreciation” of Kissinger’s “sincere efforts to get a ceasefire agreement put into force in 1973.”
This 1973 award, to Kissinger and Le Duc Tho, is the most controversial Nobel prize in history. The second most, probably, is the 1993 award, which was divided between the two leading Israeli statesmen, Rabin (prime minister) and Peres (foreign minister), and the PLO’s Arafat. The award was for the Oslo Accords — which Arafat shot to hell.
Source: https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/revocation/
