Issued by Daniela Ellerbeck on behalf of the FW de Klerk Foundation on 22/10/2024

The FW de Klerk Foundation applauds the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s decision to award the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize to Nihon Hidankyo.

“This organisation is a Japanese grassroots movement of atomic bomb survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It received the Nobel Peace Prize for, amongst other things, using the testimony of the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (the “Hibakusha”) to show why nuclear weapons must never be used again,” says Christo van der Rheede, the FW de Klerk Foundation’s Executive Director.

“Former President FW de Klerk dismantled South Africa’s nuclear arsenal and under his leadership South Africa acceded to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty on 10 July 1991. He remains the only world leader to have voluntarily dismantled and destroyed nuclear weapons his nation developed,” explains van der Rheede. “With the horrors of a global nuclear winter in mind and the current geopolitical instability, the Foundation hopes that other world leaders will follow President De Klerk’s courageous leadership example by ridding their countries of this morally unacceptable weapon with its, potentially global, catastrophic humanitarian consequences.”