Malala Yousafzai to visit Oslo and meet several politicians

Nobel Prize winner Malala Yousafzai will come to Norway on Monday to have several political meetings, including with State Secretary Henrik Thune at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

In 2014, at the age of 17, Malala Yousafzai became the youngest recipient of a Nobel Prize ever. She is coming to Norway with her husband at the invitation of Conservative politician Aamir Sheikh. She will meet multiple Norwegian politicians, according to NTB.

“A half-hour meeting with State Secretary Henrik Thune (AP) is planned. The theme is education,” communications adviser Ragnhild Simenstad in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs told NTB.

The Pakistani human rights activist is known for her fight for girls’ right to education and her commitment to improving women’s rights in Pakistan. These topics will probably also be central to the meeting with Thune.

The Taliban

According to Sheik, Malala will also meet Conservative Party (H) leader Erna Solberg on Monday.

When Solberg, as prime minister, met with Yousafzai in August last year, they talked about the position of girls and women’s education in Afghanistan after the Taliban took power.

Taliban representatives were in Norway as late as January this year, when they met Secretary of State Thune. The meeting was criticized by several sides. 

Furthermore, the Taliban have broken the promises they made during their visit to Norway in January. At the time, the Taliban envoys promised that girls would be allowed to go to school, but since then, they have decided that this does not apply to girls over the age of twelve.

Supported Thunberg

Yousafzai was in Sweden on Friday and participated in Greta Thunberg’s climate action protest outside the Riksdag. She talked about how “millions of girls lose access to schools” as a result of climate-related events.

“Events such as droughts and floods affect schools directly, and some of these events cause relocations,” she said.

“And that is why it is girls who are hardest hit: They are the first to lose school (education) and the last to return (to school),” she said.

Shot in the head

Malala was shot in the head by Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, the Afghan Taliban’s Pakistani offshoot, when she was 15 years old and on her way home from school in the Swat Valley in Pakistan. 

She survived and went to Birmingham, where she received medical treatment. Later, her family also followed. Since then, she has studied philosophy, politics, and economics at Oxford University.

Aamir Sheikh founded the Dialogue for Peace Foundation. He resigned as leader of Stovner Høyre in Oslo just before the turn of the year after a number of critical articles in Dagbladet. According to the newspaper, the Saudi-based organization Muslim World League (MWL) has paid several million kroner to Dialogue for Peace.

Source: © NTB Scanpix / #Norway Today / #NorwayTodayNews

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