Lawyer and Crime Novelist to Lead Nobel Peace Prize Committee
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Version 0 of 1. OSLO — Berit Reiss-Andersen, a Norwegian corporate lawyer who moonlights as a crime novelist, will lead the committee that chooses the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, it was announced on Tuesday. Ms. Reiss-Andersen will succeed Kaci Kullmann Five, the previous chairwoman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, who died in February. She will oversee the awarding of this year’s prize, which will be announced in October. A partner at the law firm DLA Piper, and a former chairwoman of the Norwegian Bar, Ms. Reiss-Andersen was the committee’s vice chairwoman and had been serving as acting chairwoman after Ms. Kullmann Five’s death from breast cancer. The committee is independent, but its five members are named to staggered six-year terms by Norway’s Parliament, so domestic politics play an indirect role in the awarding of the prize. Ms. Reiss-Andersen, a former prosecutor, was vice minister of justice from 1996 to 1997 and has ties to Norway’s Labour Party. Along with her legal practice, she has written crime novels with a fellow lawyer, Anne Holt. In choosing her as chairwoman, the committee passed over Thorbjorn Jagland, a former Labour prime minister, who led the committee when it awarded the prize to President Barack Obama in 2009, to the European Union in 2012 and to the imprisoned Chinese democracy advocate Liu Xiaobo in 2010. The awarding of the prize to Mr. Liu led to a six-year freeze in Norwegian-Chinese relations, which hurt trade. Mr. Jagland was unseated as chairman in 2015 and replaced by Ms. Kullmann Five, a former leader of the Conservative Party, but he remains on the committee. Also on Tuesday, the committee appointed Henrik Syse, a philosopher, as the vice chairman, and Tone Jorstad, the former director of a museum on human rights, as a committee member. |