The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) is a deserved tribute to an organisation which exemplifies the principle that human rights and basic health needs are universal and transcend state sovereignties. It is especially fitting in a year when humanitarian intervention on behalf of threatened and marginalised peoples was so much to the fore in world politics - from Kosovo to East Timor. Since it was started in Biafra in the early 1970s MSF has been involved in all the major conflicts around the world where state breakdown, repression and war have endangered vulnerable populations. The list is a catalogue of conflict - Vietnam, Honduras, Western Sahara, Lebanon, Sudan, Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Chechnya, Afghanistan, Zaire and Somalia. The organisation has proved adept at rapid, efficient and committed intervention.
Despite its early reputation as an anti-establishment force it has shown itself to be scrupulous in providing basic health care without sacrificing its political engagement. That has gained it the respect of many governments which might have been expected to oppose its involvement and has earned it the gratitude and admiration of people it has intervened to help. President Chirac caught the mood aptly yesterday when he paid tribute to how MSF has registered "the progress of universal conscience" over the years of its existence. It is now a large international organisation with some 2,000 volunteers from 80 countries and 45 nationalities, an illustration of the diversity it has cultivated without losing its French core. One of its leaders worried aloud yesterday that this award might affect its independence. So it might, but far less so than the temptation of official bureaucracies the world over to rely more and more on such non-governmental organisations to provide essential disaster relief - in itself a tribute to MSF's pioneering role.