Nobel awards take place in Stockholm with full glitz and glamour

The ceremony featured glamorous formal wear, with the men in white tie and tails and women in flowing gowns and elegant hairdos. Ceremonies in 2020 and 2021 were scaled back and there was no banquet after the ceremony.

Many laureates from 2020 and 2021 attended this year as well as the 2022 winners - last year there was a ceremony but no laureates attended as they received their medals in their home countries.

Five of the six Nobel prizes are awarded in Stockholm every year after a nomination process that is kept secret for the next 50 years. The Nobel Peace Prize is awarded in Oslo.

Dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel left around 31 million crowns - about 1.8 billion crowns (174.2 million U.S. dollars) in today's money according to the Foundation - to fund prizes for achievements in science, literature and peace awarded annually since 1901.

Among the laureates for 2022 is a former chairman of US Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, who won the Nobel Economics Prize along with economists Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig for research on how propping up failing banks can stave off an even deeper economic crisis.

The economics prize is a later addition to the original line-up, instituted by the Swedish central bank.

Scientists Carolyn Bertozzi, Morten Meldal and Barry Sharpless won the chemistry prize for discovering reactions that let molecules snap together to create new compounds and that offer insight into cell biology.

Sharpless joins an elite band of scientists who have won two Nobel prizes.

Scientists Alain Aspect, John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger won the physics prize for experiments in quantum mechanics that laid the groundwork for rapidly-developing new applications in computing and cryptography.

Swedish geneticist Svante Paabo won the medicine prize for discoveries that underpin our understanding of how modern-day people evolved from extinct ancestors at the dawn of human history.

French author Annie Ernaux was awarded the literature prize for "the courage and clinical acuity" in her largely autobiographical books examining personal memory and social inequality.

After the ceremony, there was a banquet in Stockholm's City Hall, attended by Sweden's royal family, government officials and dignitaries and business leaders from different countries.

Swedish political party leaders are always invited to the banquet. However, Jimmie Akesson, leader of the anti-immigration Sweden Democrats, which became the country's second biggest party in an election in September election, was left off the guest list, with his party not deemed to be in keeping with the prizes' tenets.

The Nobel Foundation has also snubbed the ambassadors of Russia and Belarus, following Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Jailed Belarusian activist Ales Byalyatski, Russian rights group Memorial and Ukraine's Center for Civil Liberties won the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize.

Russia wants to turn Ukraine into a "dependent dictatorship" like Belarus, the wife of jailed Belarusian Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ales Byalyatski said on Saturday upon receiving the prize on his behalf, speaking his words.

Receiving the award on behalf of her husband at Oslo City Hall, Natallia Pinchuk said Byalyatski dedicated the prize to "millions of Belarusian citizens who stood up and took action in the streets and online to defend their civil rights".

"It highlights the dramatic situation and struggles for human rights in the country," she said, adding she was speaking her husband's words.

"I know exactly what kind of Ukraine would suit Russia and Putin — a dependent dictatorship. The same as today's Belarus, where the voice of the oppressed people is ignored and disregarded," Pinchuk said, quoting her husband.

Pinchuk has met her husband once since he was named a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, in prison, behind a glass wall, she told a news conference on Friday (December 9).

Belarusian security police detained Byalyatski, 60, and others in July last year in a crackdown on opponents of the country's president, Alexander Lukashenko.

Authorities had moved to shut down non-state media outlets and human rights groups after mass protests the previous August against a presidential election that the opposition said was rigged.

Byalyatski is the fourth person to win the Nobel Peace Prize while in detention, after Germany's Carl von Ossietzky in 1935, China's Liu Xiaobo in 2010 and Myanmar's Aung San Suu Kyi, who was under house arrest, in 1991.

Russia used Belarus as a staging post for its failed advance on Kyiv, starting on February 24. Belarus has said it will not enter the war in Ukraine. Russia said on Thursday (December 8) its troops were taking part in tactical exercises in Belarus, amid concern that Moscow is pressing its ally to get more involved in the war.

Oleksandra Matviichuk, representing Ukraine's Center for Civil Liberties and Jan Rachinsky, representing Memorial, both addressed the ongoing war in their Nobel speeches.

Rachinsky said they had asked themselves if Memorial deserved to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

"Yes, we have tried to resist the erosion of historical memory and legal consciousness by documenting crimes of both the past and the present. But did our work prevent the catastrophe of 24 February? The monstrous burden that fell on our shoulders that day became heavier after we received the news that the prize had been awarded to us. No, this is not a matter of "national guilt". It is not worth talking about "national" or any other collective guilt at all – the notion of collective guilt is abhorrent to fundamental human rights principles. The joint work of the participants of our movement is based on a completely different ideological basis – on the understanding of civic responsibility for the past and for the present," he said.

Founded in 2007, the Center for Civil Liberties aims to document every single war crime committed across Ukraine.

"Since this Nobel Peace Prize Ceremony takes place during the war, I will allow myself to reach out to people around the world and call for solidarity. You don't have to be Ukrainian to support Ukraine. It is enough just to be humans," Matviichuk said.