KUALA LUMPUR, Oct 16 ― The Health Ministry congratulated today Malaysian activist Datuk Dr Ronald McCoy after a global movement he helped found won the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize for its fight to ban nuclear weapons.

Health director-general Datuk Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah said the Nobel Prize Selection Committee in Stockholm, Sweden, announced last night that Dr McCoy had put in many years of commitment to promote the non-proliferation of nuclear arms through the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN). 

"Dr McCoy is the first Malaysian ever to receive a Nobel Prize,” Dr Noor Hisham posted on Facebook.

"Congratulations to Dr McCoy and his team ― you have placed Malaysia on the world map.”

Malay Mail Online broke the news last Thursday about the role Dr McCoy, an 87-year-old retired gynaecologist from Assunta Hospital in Petaling Jaya, had played as one of the founding members of ICAN, an international campaign launched in 2007 that now comprises over 400 non-government organisations from about 100 countries.

Ten years after the launch of ICAN, the United Nations adopted last July 7 the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons that bans nuclear weapons use, threat to use, development, testing, production, possession, stockpiling, transfer, and stationing in another country.

More than 50 countries have signed the treaty, including Malaysia, although none of the nine nuclear powers ― the United States, Russia, France, the United Kingdom, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea ― had participated in negotiations on the agreement.

Dr McCoy had told Malay Mail Online that the new UN treaty would make nuclear weapons "illegal”, unlike the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) that has been seen as ineffective due to many nuclear-armed countries reportedly modernising their arsenals over the years instead of pursuing disarmament.

While ICAN won this year's Nobel Peace Prize, the 2013 award went to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, one of whose members was a Malaysian named Mohd Nasarudin Mohd Yusof.