Denis Mukwege, a doctor who helps victims of sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Nadia Murad, a Yazidi rights activist and survivor of sexual slavery by Islamic State, won the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday.

They were honoured for their efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war, the Norwegian Nobel Committee said.

“Denis Mukwege is the helper who has devoted his life to defending these victims. Nadia Murad is the witness who tells of the abuses perpetrated against herself and others,” the Committee said in its citation.

“Each of them in their own way has helped to give greater visibility to war-time sexual violence, so that the perpetrators can be held accountable for their actions.”

Mukwege heads the Panzi Hospital in the eastern Congo city of Bukavu. The clinic receives thousands of women each year, many of them requiring surgery from sexual violence.

Murad is an advocate for the Yazidi minority in Iraq and for refugee and women’s rights in general. She was enslaved and raped by Islamic State fighters in Mosul, Iraq, in 2014.

“Rape in war has been a crime for centuries. But it was a crime in the shadows. The two laureates have both shone a light on it,” Dan Smith, Director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), told Reuters.

Mukwege, a past winner of the United Nations Human Rights Prize and the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize, dedicated his Nobel award to all women affected by rape and sexual violence.

He has performed surgery on scores of women after they had been raped by armed men, and campaigned to highlight their plight. He also provides HIV/AIDS treatment as well as free maternal care.

Although the Second Congo War, which killed more than five million people, formally ended in 2003, violence remains rampant, with militias frequently targeting civilians.

The Panzi Hospital has also been the target of threats, and in 2012 Mukwege’s home was invaded by armed men who held his daughters at gunpoint, shot at him and killed his bodyguard.

Shortly before that attack, he had denounced mass rape in the Democratic Republic of Congo and impunity for it in a speech at the United Nations.

“He has risked his life to help women survive atrocity,” said SIPRI’s Smith.

Mukwege was in the operation room when he was told the news.

Later, speaking at a news conference at the hospital, he said the prize was an important recognition of many women’s trauma.

“Dear survivors all over the world, I would like to tell you that through this prize, the world is listening to you and rejects indifference, the world refuses to stand idly by in the face of your suffering,” he said.

Wivine Moleka, a member of Congo’s ruling PPRD party, said Mukwege was more than just a doctor.

“He is a humanist who has taken the pain of women into consideration, pain in their flesh and in their soul. The prize sends a strong signal to everyone about these women who are raped every day,” she said.

SURVIVAL

Murad said she shared the award “with all Yazidis with all the Iraqis, Kurds and all the minorities and all survivors of sexual violence around the world”.

“For myself, I think of my mother, who was murdered by Daesh,” she said said in a statement to Reuters, using an Arabic term for Islamic State.

Murad was 21-years-old in 2014 when Islamic State militants attacked the village where she had grown up in northern Iraq. The militants killed those who refused to convert to Islam, including six of her brothers and her mother.

Along with many of the other young women in her village, she was taken into captivity by the militants, and sold repeatedly for sex as part of Islamic State’s slave trade.

She escaped captivity with the help of a Sunni Muslim family in Mosul, then IS’s de facto capital in Iraq, and became an advocate for the rights of her community around the world.

In 2017, Murad published a memoir of her ordeal, “The Last Girl”. She recounted in harrowing detail her months in captivity, her escape and her journey to activism.

“At some point, there was rape and nothing else. This becomes your normal day,” she wrote.

The United Nations has called the assaults launched by the Sunni militants against the religious minority in northern Iraq a campaign of genocide.

Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi congratulated her on the award, and Vian Dakhil, a Yazidi member of Iraq’s parliament, said: “It is the victory of good and peace over the forces of darkness.”

Murad, who is also a Sakharov Prize winner, is the second youngest Nobel Prize laureate after Malala Yousafzai.

SPEAK UP

The award follows a year in which the abuse and mistreatment of women in all walks of life across the globe has been a focus of attention.

Asked whether the #metoo movement, a prominent women’s rights activist forum, was an inspiration for this year’s prize, Nobel Committee Chairwoman Berit Reiss-Andersen said: “Metoo and war crimes are not quite the same. But they have in common that they see the suffering of women, the abuse of women and that it is important that women leave the concept of shame behind and speak up.”

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the award was part of a growing movement to recognize the violence and injustice faced by women.

“Let us honour these new Nobel laureates by standing up for victims of sexual violence everywhere,” he said in a statement.

The prize will be presented in Oslo on Dec. 10, the anniversary of the death of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, who founded the awards in his 1895 will.

A U.N. investigative team that will collect and preserve evidence of acts by Islamic State in Iraq that may be war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide started work this week, nearly a year after the Security Council created it.

At last September’s annual U.N. gathering of world leaders, the council unanimously adopted a British-drafted resolution – after a year of talks with Iraq – asking U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to create the team “to support domestic efforts” to hold the militants accountable.

U.N. experts had warned in June 2016 that Islamic State was committing genocide against the Yazidis in Syria and Iraq to destroy the minority religious community through killings, sexual slavery and other crimes.

Guterres notified the 15-member Security Council in a letter that the U.N. team, led by British lawyer Karim Asad Ahmad Khan, would start work on Aug. 20.

Guterres announced in May that he had appointed Khan after the Security Council approved the scope and limitations for the team in February. He said in the letter, released on Thursday, that Khan visited Iraq earlier this month.

Use of evidence collected by the team in other venues, such as international courts, would “be determined in agreement with the Government of Iraq on a case-by-case basis.” Evidence is for primary use by Iraqi authorities, followed by “competent national-level courts,” according to the 2017 U.N. resolution.

International human rights lawyer Amal Clooney and Nadia Murad, a young Yazidi woman who was enslaved and raped by Islamic State fighters in Mosul, have long pushed Iraq to allow U.N. investigators to help.

Islamic State, which until last year controlled large areas in Syria and Iraq, has since been driven into the desert by successive defeats in offensives by international allies in both countries. The U.N. investigative team’s mission does not include Syria.

The European Parliament awarded its Sakharov Prize for freedom of thought on Thursday to two Iraqi Yazidi women who were held as sex slaves by Islamic State militants and now campaign for human rights.

Nadia Murad and Lamiya Aji Bashar were among thousands of women and girls abducted, tortured and sexually abused by Islamic State fighters after the militants rounded up Yazidis in the village of Kocho, near Sinjar in northwest Iraq, in 2014.

The Yazidi are a religious sect whose beliefs combine elements of several ancient Middle Eastern religions. Islamic State considers them devil-worshippers.

“This is a very symbolic and significant decision to support these two survivors who came to Europe as refugees and found shelter in the European Union,” European Parliament president Martin Schulz told a news conference after the announcement.

He added the prize meant the parliament was now supporting them in their fight not only for dignity but to give testimony as witnesses to atrocities. The prize is 50,000 euros (44,704 pound), with an award ceremony scheduled for December.

Islamic State insurgents overran Sinjar in August 2014, systematically killing, capturing and enslaving thousands of Yazidi inhabitants

Murad, now aged 23, was held by IS in Mosul but escaped her captors in November 2014, reached a refugee camp and eventually made her way to Germany.

She has since become active as an advocate for the Yazidis, and refugee and women’s rights in general, as well as campaigning against human trafficking.

She has briefed the U.N. Security Council on the problem of human trafficking and last month launched Nadia’s Initiative to help victims of genocide. She has called for the massacre of Yazidis to be recognised as genocide.

Bashar, 18, was captured in the same raid as Murad and also kept as a sex slave by IS. She escaped in March but was badly disfigured and blinded in one eye when a landmine went off as she fled. Two companions were killed.

She now lives in Germany, where she has undergone treatment for her wounds, and works as an advocate for the Yazidis.

GENOCIDE

Mass Yazidi graves have been uncovered in the area north of Sinjar mountain, which was taken from IS in Dec. 2014. Kurdish forces retook Sinjar town in November 2014 in a two-day offensive backed by air strikes from a U.S.-led coalition

U.N. investigators said in a report in June that Islamic State is committing genocide against the Yazidis in Syria and Iraq to destroy the religious community of 400,000 people through killings, sexual slavery and other crimes.

Such a designation, rare under international law, would mark the first recognised genocide carried out by non-state actors, rather than a state or paramilitaries acting on its behalf.

The Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, named after the late Russian dissident and scientist Andrei Sakharov is awarded each year by the European Parliament. Set up in 1988, it honours individuals and organisations defending human rights and basic freedoms.

Murad and Aji Bashar were selected by Schulz and political group leaders from a shortlist with two more political nominees.

The others were Can Dundar, a leading Turkish journalist sentenced to six years in prison for publishing state secrets involving Ankara’s Syria operation, and Mustafa Dzhemilev, a senior Crimean Tartar politician and human rights activist banned by Russia from entering the annexed Crimea peninsular.

Last year, the prize went to Raif Badawi, a blogger from Saudi Arabia serving a prison sentence for insulting Islam.