Nobels vilje

In his newest book, The Nobel Peace Prize (2010), Norwegian lawyer and author Fredrik S. Heffermehl, shows how far the custodians of Nobel´s prize for "the champions of peace" have moved the prize away from the testator´s actual intentions. Part I offers the first known legal analysis of the testament Nobel wrote in 1895, and in Part II an analysis of the political methods used by official Norway to stonewall the truth about the mismanagement of Nobel´s great vision of peace. The book, in part a case study of democracy and the rule of law in Norway, takes us from the inception of the prize 115 years ago to the present, including a riveting dissection of the 2009 award to US president Barack Obama. It explains how the military sector – in all nations – undermines human security and welfare, preferring to pursue narrow self-interest to solving the real security needs of the world.
For the first time The Nobel Peace Prize provides access to the highly secretive Nobel committee room, by publishing the revealing private diaries of the longest sitting chair of the Nobel committee, Gunnar Jahn.

The Nobel Peace Prize. What Nobel really wanted (Praeger, 2010), offers undisputable evidence that Nobel intended to support the "Champions of peace", those struggling to replace militarism with an international order based on law and abolition of national military forces; the power of the law must replace the law of power. Since 1948 the parties in the Norwegian parliament have delegated the appointment of the Nobel committee to the major parties who misuse the attractive seats as a reward to their party veterans, people lacking not only insight but also loyalty to the peace ideas that Nobel wished to support. In fact the committee members are opposed to the idea of the prize! People who believe in security by military means have taken charge of a prize meant to support a demilitarized world order.
The prize has long ago ceased to challenge the forces it intended to combat and instead been used to promote Norwegian policies and business interests.
Claiming that the Norwegian parliament and the Nobel committee have violated the law for six decades, the book also becomes an illuminating case study of how elites in the advanced Scandinavian societies circumvent the basic tenets of democracy and the rule of law.

Nobel entrusted the bestowal of one of his five prizes to a five-member committee to be appointed by Norway´s parliament. The Nobel committees, misunderstanding their task, have used the prizes to serve their own ideas of "peace," instead of honoring "the champions of peace", the expression Nobel actually used to describe the recipients.
Interpreting a will is to seek what the testator actually intended. The point of departure is the text of the will, but a number of other circumstances can provide clues to understanding Nobel´s thinking at the exact point of time when he signed his will. The book sums up its analysis of the correct interpretation of the will of Alfred Nobel (page 37-38):

Interpretation—the determining factors
To sum up: the goal of the interpretation of a will is to find out what the testator intended, the purpose he or she had in mind. To describe the recipients he had in mind Nobel created a Swedish word, fredsförfäktare (‘‘champions of peace’’). Under the law it is both improper and illegal for the Nobel Committee to ignore the specific expression that Nobel actually used, champions of peace, and instead give its own content to the much less specific term ‘‘peace prize.’’ The committee is guilty of an unauthorized change of its mandate.

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In his will Alfred Nobel entrusted to the Norwegian parliament to award his prize for "the champions of peace" (by which he meant the peace movement). The concept is elaborated in Chapters 8 and 14:

Nobel clearly specified the recipients

The truth is that many of the grassroots activists, after decades of work in the field of disarmament, often know the themes and the political situation better than diplomats who keep changing their job. People in the peace movement monitor national positions, talk more freely, move more freely, and think more freely on possible solutions. In this way, they can be of invaluable assistance to the diplomats. Following is a selection of just some of those individuals who have taken the future on their shoulders and dedicated their lives to the struggle against nuclear weapons: …

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The meeting hall at the Nobel Peace Center was packed with people, listening to ForUM (Forum for Environment and Development) launching a political report on moral dilemmas in Norwegian foreign policy, not least between arms exports and peacemaking. When one of the four panelists, in a senior military position, defended the burgeoning arms exports of Norway—the ''Peace Nation''—I felt I had to confront him, saying that the military was selling an illusion of security at an exorbitant price, placing the continuation of life on earth in constant jeopardy.…

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IN ENGLISH
The Nobel Peace Prize (Praeger, USA, 2010), contains, as Part I, a legal and historical analysis of Alfred Nobel´s will and the content of the peace prize, and in an added Part II an account of the methods used by Norway´s political elite to stonewall the truth about their breach of trust. Heffermehl´s conclusions concur with a number of earlier scholarly works on what Nobel had in mind. The book also includes a case study of democracy and the rule of law in Norway, as well as discussions of the 2008 and 2009 Nobel awards, a riveting dissection of the Nobel speech of Obama, and the previously unpublished secrets contained in the private diaries of the longest sitting chair of the Nobel committee, Gunnar Jahn - secrets that show amateurism and a number of manifestly wrong decisions.

IN CHINESE
On January 9, 2011, the Foreign Languages Press, a leading Chinese publishing house, launched a translation into Chinese (Simplified) of the American original. The launch of the book, with a completely rewritten Preface and a special added Epilogue, took place at the Beijing (internal) Book Fair.

1月9日，2011年，外文出版社，领先的中国出版社推出成中文（简体）美国原来的译本。该书的推出一个完全重写的序言和一个特殊的，补充尾声，参加了在北京（内部）书展举行。

IN NORWEGIAN
A forerunner to The Nobel Peace Prize was published in 2008 (by Vidarforlaget, Oslo). Even if this book, Nobels vilje [Nobel´s will], appeared in Norwegian only it became known all over the world within three days of its publication! - Despite the devastating analysis of how the Nobel committee and Norway´s Parliament had illegally appropriated for their own purposes the prize entrusted to their care, the Norwegian power elites continued as before, stonewalling the criticism; it was business as usual.

IN RUSSIAN - ПЕРЕВОД НА РУССКОМ
Книга "Нобелевская премия мира" будет опубликована осенью 2011 года.

IN SWEDISH - PÅ SVENSKA
Boken Nobels fredspris. Visionen som försvann blev publicerad i oktober 2011.

The book contains an evaluation of the reasons given by the committee for each of the 121 prizes awarded 1901–2010 with tables like the two following to illustrate the trends:

Table 4.2
Number of (total) awarded and not justified Nobel Peace Prizes by decade

Table 6.1
Number of awarded and not justified Nobel Peace Prizes by committee chair

For a number of decades the prize has been Nobel´s only in name, in reality it has been the prize of the Norwegian parliament. As documented by Heffermehl in his book the prize has been appropriated and used to serve national political and commercial interests as well as the private views and prestige of the parliamentarians. A total 10 of the 11 prizes awarded from 2003 to 2010 have been rated not justified, a fail rate of 91%.

The American version of the book contains, in Annex 1, a practical guide, "How to earn
the Nobel Peace Prize," with list of people entitled to nominate, practical examples of the
types of activities that qualify, address to use and time limit. See more here.