Julian Assange launches legal challenge to stop Machado Peace Prize award

Julian Assange has legally challenged the Nobel Foundation to stop Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado from receiving the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize funds, accusing her of promoting war rather than peace.

Machado in Oslo, December 11 -- Kevin Payravi, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Various Sources

Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has filed a formal complaint and lawsuit targeting the Nobel Foundation’s decision to award the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize to Venezuelan María Corina Machado. Assange sates that Machado’s actions contradict the prize's alleged principles of peace, citing her recent political stance supporting military intervention efforts, particularly those linked to U.S. aggression in Venezuela.

“Alfred Nobel’s endowment for peace cannot be spent on the promotion of war,” Assange states, adding that “Machado has continued to incite the Trump Administration to pursue its escalatory path” against her own country.

Assange’s legal challenge, which includes a criminal complaint filed in Sweden, claims that awarding Machado amounts to a misappropriation of Nobel Prize funds and implicates individuals within the Nobel Foundation in violating Swedish law by facilitating acts that are war crimes. The complaint seeks to block Machado from receiving the approximately one million US dollars in prize money on these grounds.

As Assange and many other critics have noted, Machado’s openly supportive rhetoric toward forceful regime change attempts against Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro is completely contrary to the spirit of the Peace Prize.