ISLAMABAD – Komal Ali Shah has become the first Pakistani student to be selected for the Hiroshima-ICAN Academy on Nuclear Weapons and Global Security 2021, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017.
The 25-year-old, who is Mphil student at the National Defence University in Islamabad, is among the 41 participants selected from across the globe for the training programme. She is the first Pakistani to make it to the international organisation.
The programme, which was first started in 2019 in Geneva, takes place every year with a key aim to mobilize civil society around the world to support the objective of prohibiting and eliminating nuclear weapons.
Komal told the media that she would focus on encouraging campaigns about nuclear disarmament from an educational perspective, adding that she would conduct a research on environmental hazards around the testing sites of nuclear weapons.
She lamented that the humanitarian aspect is neglected whenever nuclear policies are formulated by the regulators.
For the programme, half of the participants are selected from nuclear-weapon states like the UK, USA, Germany, Russia and China and the remaining are picked from non-recognized nuclear-weapon states such as Pakistan, India and Israel.
The themes for this year programme include the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons and the political, legal, and technical aspects of nuclear weapons and global security.
