Seoul Peace Prize


The Seoul Peace Prize was established in 1990 as a biennial recognition with monetary award to commemorate the success of the 24th Summer Olympic Games held in Seoul, South Korea, an event in which 160 nations from across the world took part, creating harmony and friendship. The Seoul Peace Prize was established to crystallize the wishes of the Korean people for peace in the Korean peninsula and the rest of the world. The nominating group, the Seoul Peace Prize Cultural Foundation, consists of 500 Korean nationals and 800 internationals. The awardee receives a diploma, a plaque and honorarium of US$200,000.
Past Seoul Peace Prize recipients have gone on to be nominated and awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, including Médecins Sans Frontières and Bangladeshi Dr. Muhammad Yunus, the founder of Grameen Bank which pioneered the concept of microcredit for supporting innovators in multiple developing countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America, and also inspired programs such as the Infolady Social Entrepreneurship Programme of Dnet.

Recipients

YearRecipientCountry
1990Juan Antonio Samaranch
1992George Shultz
1996Médecins Sans Frontières
1998Kofi Annan
2000Sadako Ogata
2002Oxfam
2004Václav Havel
2006Muhammad Yunus
2008Suzanne Scholte
2010José Antonio Abreu
2012Ban Ki-moon
2014Angela Merkel
2016Denis Mukwege
2018Narendra Modi

Controversy

There was controversy in 2018, when Indian prime minister Narendra Modi was awarded by the Seoul Peace Prize Cultural Foundation, which claimed that his economic policies "reduced social and economic disparity between the rich and the poor" in India. This decision was protested by 26 Korean non-governmental organizations and Korean civil society groups, who held a press conference in South Korea. They cited his divisive Hindu nationalist politics, and accused him of being allegedly complicit in anti-Muslim violence in India, notably the 2002 Gujarat riots where over 1,000 people were killed. They called the decision to award Modi a "disgrace" to the Seoul Peace Prize, and compared Modi to former South Korean military president Chun Doo-hwan, who was accused of the Gwangju Massacre which killed over 600 people in 1980.