For a president who loves to stand in front of the cameras, the visit of Venezuelan opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Corina Machado was, to say the least, atypical.

It was a closed-door meeting, held away from the presence of journalists.

“Know that we are counting on President Donald Trump for the freedom of Venezuela,” Machado commented shortly after the meeting.

“I was very impressed by how clear he is. How he understands the situation in Venezuela, how much he cares about what the people of Venezuela are suffering,” she added later, after leaving a meeting with a group of legislators at the Capitol.

But she wasn't only generous with praise for President Donald Trump: during the meeting, she presented him with the Nobel Peace Prize medal she received in December as “recognition for his unique commitment to our freedom.”

“I told him: '200 years ago, General Lafayette presented President Simon Bolivar with a medal bearing George Washington's image, which he had always treasured. Exactly 200 years later, Bolivar's people are returning a medal to Washington in recognition," the opposition leader explained. “The fact that this gesture is taking place two centuries later, almost like a historical mirror, gives it exceptional symbolic power," Machado added in a statement released after the meeting. Hours later, Trump confirmed in a message on his Truth Social network that he had received the award from Machado. And to quell any speculation, the White House later released a photo of Machado standing next to Trump in the Oval Office holding the medal in a large frame. What the Nobel Committee Says: While the gesture raised many questions, it came as no surprise to anyone. Machado had announced last week his intention to share the world's most prestigious prize, which rewards diplomatic efforts in pursuit of peace, with the US president. But can he really do it?"Once the Nobel Prize is announced, it cannot be revoked, shared, or transferred to other people," it stated in a press release. "The decision is final and valid forever," they said. However, it specifies that the statutes of the Nobel Foundation "do not impose restrictions on what a laureate can do with the medal, diploma, or prize money. This means that the laureate is free to keep, give away, sell, or donate these items." The organization also points out that the committees that award the Nobel Prizes have never considered revoking a prize. Furthermore, as a matter of principle, it does not comment on what Nobel Peace Prize winners say or do afterwards. receive it.

“Any subsequent evaluation or decision by the laureates should be understood as their own responsibility,” it points out.

The committee also does not consider it its role “to issue daily comments on Nobel Peace Prize laureates or on the political processes in which they participate.”

So far, true to what it says on its website, the organization has not made any specific comments about Machado's gesture.

However, the Norwegian media, as well as numerous experts, do not believe the news.

“It is completely unheard of,” commented Janne Haaland Matlary, a professor at the University of Oslo and a former politician, to the public broadcaster NRK, adding, “It is a total lack of respect for the prize.”

“This is incredibly shameful and damaging to one of the most prestigious awards in the world,” wrote Raymond Johansen, secretary of the NGO Norwegian People's Aid and former city councilor, on his social media. Oslo.

Meanwhile, Kirsti Bergstø, leader of Norway's Socialist Left party and its foreign policy spokesperson, declared: “This is, first and foremost, absurd. The Peace Prize cannot be given away.”

For his part, Trygve Slagsvold Vedum, leader of the Center party, declared: “Whoever received the prize, received it. The fact that Trump accepted the medal says a lot about him: a typical braggart seeking to adorn himself with the honors and work of others.”

Other cases

Regardless of what the Nobel Prize rules stipulate, in the past there have been medals that have changed hands, a withdrawn nomination, and others that have been rejected.

The Vietnamese diplomat Le ?uc Tho, for example, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics along with then-US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in 1973 for negotiations the ceasefire in the Vietnam War.

However, he refused to accept it, arguing that the other side had violated the truce.

In 2014, the disgraced American scientist James Watson auctioned off the medal he received in 1962 along with Maurice Wilkins and Francis Crick for discovering the structure of DNA,becoming the first laureate to sell his prize.

Watson argued that he disposed of the medal because he had been ostracized by the scientific community after making racist comments in a 2007 interview.

Leon Lederman, a US experimental physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1988 along with two colleagues, decided in 2015, he auctioned off his medal, won after the discovery of a subatomic particle called the muon neutrino.

The money raised was used to buy a log cabin near the small town of Driggs in eastern Idaho for vacations.

More recently, in 2022, Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov auctioned his Nobel Peace Prize for US$103.5 million to raise funds for refugee children from Ukraine.

Background

Maria Corina Machado's "gift" to Trump was not the first time a Nobel Prize was given away.

In 1954, American writer Ernest Hemingway won the Nobel Prize in Literature for works such as "The Old Man and the Sea," which tells the story of a Cuban fisherman who caught a giant fish.

Due to health problems, the writer and journalist did not travel to Sweden for the ceremony and it was the Swedish ambassador to Cuba who presented him with the medal and diploma at his home near Havana.

Years later, Hemingway donated the medal and diploma to the people of Cuba, entrusting them to the care of the Catholic Church of El Cobre.

The medal was stolen and quickly recovered in 1986. Today, only the diploma remains on display.

The day Hitler was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize

While the prize cannot be transferred or revoked, there is the possibility of withdrawing a nomination.

The archives of the Norwegian Nobel Institute hold a curious story from 1939, in which a misunderstanding led its organizers to this situation.

That year, 12 Swedish parliamentarians nominated British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain for the Nobel Peace Prize.

They argued that Chamberlain had saved the world peace through the Munich Agreement with Adolf Hitler in September 1938, when the Czechoslovak region of the Sudetenland was handed over to Germany. Three days later, Swedish parliamentarian and Social Democratic leader Erik Brandt sent a letter to the Nobel Committee explaining that Hitler should be nominated. The nomination sparked outrage and a wave of protests across the country. Brandt was described as “crazy, clumsy, and a traitor to working-class values,” according to the Nobel website. His nomination was intended to be ironic, Brandt explained in an interview. The parliamentarian wrote that by nominating Hitler, he sought, through irony, “to nail him to the wall of shame as the number one enemy of peace in the world."But observing that the reactions to his proposal had been so violent and that most had not grasped his intention, he decided to send a letter to the committee withdrawing his nomination.