Thorbjørn Jagland’s demotion greeted with jubilation from some rightwingers, marking the first time the Nobel committee leader has been deposed

The committee that awards the Nobel peace prize was embroiled in controversy on Tuesday when its chair was ousted by rightwingers, the first time the committee’s leader has been deposed in the 114-year history of the Nobel prize.

Speculation that Thorbjørn Jagland, the Labour party chair of the committee since 2009, would be forced out had been mounting since the director of the Nobel Institute said in October the practice of appointing former political leaders to the committee had become a “burden” on its independence. Jagland is a Norwegian former prime minister and foreign minister.

Jagland’s final act as head of the committee was to award last year’s peace prize to Malala Yousafzai, the 17-year-old Pakistani student shot by the Taliban for supporting girls’ education, and Indian child labour activist Kailash Satyarthi. But not all the decisions during his tenure were so popular.

Ties between Norway and China have been frozen since Beijing condemned the award of the 2010 prize to prominent Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, rejecting Oslo’s insistence that the Nobel committee is independent of government.

In 2012 the committee awarded the prize to the European Union, although the bloc was mired in recession and some of its members were involved in military interventions in North Africa and the Middle East.

“The EU is clearly not the ‘champion of peace’ that Alfred Nobel had in mind when he wrote his will,” Archbishop Desmond Tutu wrote in an open letter with two other former laureates.

After the announcement Jagland was quoted by Norwegian media as saying: “Those elected from the Conservative and Progress parties in parliament have chosen a new committee chairman and won a majority. I must relate to that.”

The award also resulted in accusations of a conflict of interest between Jagland’s role as committee chair and his position as secretary general of the 47-nation Council of Europe, with speculation that the Nobel committee would find it hard to award the prize to a Russian opposition figure because of the potential for tensions with the Kremlin.



Perhaps most controversially, however, in Jagland’s first year as chairman the committee awarded the peace prize to US president Barack Obama, who had been in post for barely nine months, and was about to preside over a major expansion of the US military effort in Afghanistan – and the use of drones in the war on terror.

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Morten Wetland, a former Norwegian ambassador to the UN, claimed last year the “most embarrassing day” in his job came when the prize was awarded to Obama, whose then-chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, accused Norway of “fawning” over the new president.

Kaci Kullmann Five, the committee’s new chair, is a former leader of the Conservative party and previously Jagland’s deputy. Jagland himself will remain on the committee for a further six-year term.

“There was broad agreement within the committee that Thorbjørn Jagland had been a good chair for six years,” Kullmann Five told reporters, but declined to comment further.

The Nobel committee mirrors the political complexion of Norway’s parliament, with two members appointed by Labour, two by the Conservatives, and one from the Progress party, which since 2013 has governed in coalition with the conservatives. The committee chooses its own chairperson.

Jagland’s demotion was greeted with jubilation by some rightwingers in Norway. Magnus Thue, a government adviser, tweeted: “The clown is ousted as chairman.” He later offered an apology in another tweet, claiming it was “churlish”.



Janne Haaland Matláry, professor of political science at Oslo University and a Conservative critic of Jagland, said she expected his supporters would portray the change in the committee as “appeasing” China and pandering to Norwegian business interests damaged by the frosty relations between the two countries.

“But this is a very far-fetched kind of argument – China has no influence on this committee,” she said. “I expect the Nobel committee to remain truly independent, and to continue to award prizes that are controversial. Otherwise it will lose its relevance.”



Jagland reportedly left the Nobel Institute building by a back entrance on Tuesday to avoid an encounter with journalists before the change of management was formally announced.

Jagland told Norwegian media last October that he had “acted independently” during all his Nobel work.

“I think the committee members will be able to confirm that. If the committee avoids debate and caters to what satisfies Norwegian authorities, we are on the wrong path,” he said.