Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado will miss the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo on Wednesday, with her daughter accepting the award on her behalf, the Norwegian Nobel Institute confirmed.
Machado is not in Norway and will not attend the afternoon ceremony at Oslo City Hall, Nobel Institute director Kristian Berg Harpviken told Norwegian public broadcaster NRK on Wednesday.
Her eldest daughter, Ana Corina Sosa Machado, will receive the prize instead, Harpviken said.
Machado’s attendance had been uncertain after the Nobel Institute on Tuesday postponed and then cancelled a planned press conference with the laureate.
“María Corina Machado has herself stated in interviews how challenging the journey to Oslo, Norway, will be,” the institute said in a statement Tuesday. “We therefore cannot at this point provide any further information about when and how she will arrive for the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony.”
Machado, 58, has been living in hiding in Venezuela since August 2024 and has not appeared in public since 9 January, when she was briefly detained after joining supporters at a protest in Caracas ahead of President Nicolás Maduro’s third-term inauguration.
Venezuelan authorities said last month they would consider Machado a “fugitive” if she travelled to Norway to accept the prize, putting her at risk of arrest if she returned to the country.
“There is a long tradition that when a Peace Prize laureate cannot be present, close family members represent them,” Harpviken told NRK. “That happened with Narges Mohammadi and with Ales Bialiatski, both were imprisoned at the time.”
Machado’s mother, Corina Parisca, and her three children arrived in Oslo for the ceremony.
Not the first time
The absence of a laureate is not unprecedented. In 2010, imprisoned Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo was unable to attend and no one collected his prize.
In 2022, Belarus’s Ales Bialiatski was represented by his wife, Natallia Pinchuk. A year later, the teenage children of Iran’s Narges Mohammadi travelled to Oslo to accept the Nobel on her behalf.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded Machado the prize in October for keeping “the flame of democracy burning amid a growing darkness” and for “her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela.”
Machado won the opposition’s primary election but was barred by the government from running against Maduro in the July 2024 presidential election. She has accused Maduro of stealing the election, a claim backed by much of the international community.
Argentine President Javier Milei, Panama’s President José Raúl Mulino, Paraguay’s President Santiago Peña and Ecuador’s President Daniel Noboa are attending the ceremony.
The four Latin American heads of state will be received by King Harald V on Wednesday after the ceremony, before holding individual meetings with Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre.
Exiled Venezuelan opposition presidential candidate Edmundo González Urrutia, who sought asylum in Spain in September 2024, also arrived in Oslo on Tuesday.