October 10 in History
2014 - Malala Yousafzai, a 17-year-old Pakistani girl, and Kailash Satyarthi, a 60-year-old Indian man, are jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for risking their lives for the right of children to receive an education and to live free from abuse
Pakistani teenager Malala Yousafzai, who was shot in the head by the Taliban in 2012 for advocating girls’ right to education, and Indian children’s rights activist Kailash Satyarthi were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on this day in 2014. At 17, she is the youngest person to receive a Nobel Prize, by some margin.
Satyarthi, 60, and Yousafzai were picked for their struggle against the oppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education.
The award was made at a time when hostilities had broken out between India and Pakistan along the border of the disputed, mainly Muslim region of Kashmir — the worst fighting between the nuclear-armed rivals in more than a decade.
Yousafzai was attacked in 2012 on a school bus in the Swat Valley in northwestern Pakistan by masked gunmen as a punishment for a blog that she started writing for the BBC’s Urdu service as an 11-year-old to campaign against the Taliban’s efforts to deny women an education.
Unable to return to Pakistan after her recovery, Yousafzai moved to Britain, setting up the Malala Fund and supporting local education advocacy groups with a focus on Pakistan, Nigeria, Jordan, Syria and Kenya.
Satyarthi, who gave up a career as an electrical engineer in 1980 to campaign against child labour, has headed various forms of peaceful protests and demonstrations, focusing on the exploitation of children for financial gain.
He has led the rescue of tens of thousands of child slaves and developed a successful model for their education and rehabilitation.
-Al Jazeera
Photo Caption – Malala Yousafzai, left, in 2013 and Kailash Satyarthi, Oct. 10, 2014 – Patrick Seeger / EPA; Chandan Khanna / AFP / Getty Images
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