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French President Nicolas Sarkozy - Source: Reuters
Barack Obama's in the running for the most prestigious award for peace, along with French president Nicolas Sarkozy, who is among a record 250 nominations for this year's Nobel Peace prize.
The new head of Norway's Nobel Committee Thorbjoern Jagland chaired on Thursday for the first time the five-member committee that awards the prize annually in Oslo and he said in an interview the prestige of the peace prize must be guarded.
"The peace prize is one of the most prestigious prizes in the world and it is not an easy task to keep it at that level - one must be careful choosing the prize winners so that the world community accepts and takes note of it," he said.
"It is a prize for the entire world," said Jagland, who is president of Norway's parliament and a former prime minister. "It has to reflect the attitudes present in the world community, like it has done very successfully many times."
The scope of the prize has grown over the decades from its roots in disarmament and peacemaking, expanding to human rights work from the 1960s and even to the fight against climate change with the 2007 award to former US Vice President Al Gore.
Critics of the expansion say the prize has strayed too far from the intention of its creator, Swedish inventor and philanthropist Alfred Nobel, in his 1895 will.
But Jagland, who was Labour prime minister in 1996-1997 and has chosen not to seek re-election to parliament this September, said he favours the wide approach taken by the committee.
"That has been absolutely necessary to keep the prestige."
Nobel's will said the peace prize should be awarded for "the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations and the abolition or reduction of standing armies and the formation and spreading of peace congresses".
"If one only looks to what Alfred Nobel wrote (in his will), then very few could have got the prize over the years," he said. "The perspective of what peace building was 100 years ago was quite different from how we assess that now."
Jagland declined to say if the scope could be widened more.
Council of Europe ambition
Since last year Jagland has been actively campaigning to become the next secretary-general of the 47-nation Council of Europe which promotes human rights and the rule of law and which will choose a new chief in late June.
Jagland said on Friday that the role of Nobel committee chairman could be combined well with the Council of Europe job and serve as a door-opener for the Council's top official. "It would be excellent for the Council that the secretary-general have a position in the Nobel committee," he said.
"It is an opportunity for the Council of Europe to build new networks, get more access to political leaders and many important non-governmental organisations," he said.
The Nobel committee said in a statement on Friday it received a record 205 nominations for the 2009 prize by the February 1 deadline, exceeding a previous record of 199 from 2005. Thirty-three of the nominations are for organisations, the rest for individuals.
The committee does not disclose the names of the nominees. The 2009 laureate will be announced in October.
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