Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos has been awarded the 2016 Nobel Peace Prize for efforts to end decades of war with Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas, the Norwegian Nobel Committee said Friday.
2016 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos. Photo from 2010 @creativecommons pic.twitter.com/IHEEt2nFLb
— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) 7 октября 2016 г.
"The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided to award the Nobel Peace Prize for 2016 to Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos for his resolute efforts to bring the country's more than 50-year-long civil war to an end," the committee said in a statement.
Colombia's National Election Council said over the weekend the peace agreement failed to garner the support of the majority of Colombian voters at a referendum.
"The fact that a majority of the voters said no to the peace accord does not necessarily mean that the peace process is dead," the committee stressed.
The 2015 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet for its contribution to the building of a pluralistic democracy in Tunisia in the wake of the 2011 Jasmine Revolution.
About Santos
Juan Manuel Santos was born in Bogota, Colombia, in 1951. After graduating from the Naval Academy in Cartagena, he went on to study economics, journalism and law in Kansas University, the London School of Economics, Harvard Law School and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.
Santos served as Colombia's Minister of Finance and Public Credit in 2000-2004, then as the Minister of Defense in 2006-2009. In 2010, he was elected President of Colombia and then in 2014, reelected for a second term.
