The Nobel Foundation and the Norwegian Nobel Committee have reiterated that Nobel Prizes cannot be transferred or shared after Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, presented her Peace Prize medal to U.S. President Donald Trump during a White House meeting.
Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, who won the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize, presented her Nobel Peace Prize medal to U.S. President Donald Trump during a White House meeting in mid-January, calling the gesture a symbolic recognition of Trump’s support for political change in Venezuela, according to reporting by Reuters and other outlets.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee subsequently issued a written clarification emphasizing that the Nobel Peace Prize itself is not transferable. The committee said that “regardless of what may happen to the medal, the diploma, or the prize money, it is and remains the original laureate who is recorded in history as the recipient of the prize,” and added that even if the medal or diploma changes hands, it does not alter who was awarded the prize.
The committee also said there are no restrictions in the Nobel Foundation’s statutes on what a laureate may do with the physical items and money that accompany the award, meaning the recipient may keep, give away, sell, or donate them—while the official status of laureate remains unchanged.
Separately, the Nobel Foundation issued a statement dated January 18, 2026, saying one of its core missions is to safeguard the dignity of the Nobel Prizes and their administration. Referencing Alfred Nobel’s will and the rules governing the prizes, the Foundation said a prize “can therefore not, even symbolically, be passed on or further distributed,” and directed further questions to the Norwegian Nobel Committee.
Reports on the political backdrop to Machado’s gesture—including accounts of U.S. military action in Venezuela and the status of Nicolás Maduro—vary by outlet and have not been confirmed in the Nobel bodies’ statements.
