IRNA – Iranian foreign minister and EU foreign policy chief top the lists of two Norwegian experts’ preferred candidates for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.

The Iran nuclear deal and its two main facilitators, Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Federica Mogherini, have emerged as top candidates to win the Nobel Peace Prize which is expected to be announced in Oslo next Friday, Norway's News in English journal reported.

Both historian Asle Sveen, who has written several books on the Nobel Peace Prize, and Henrik Urdal, the new director of the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), have independently made the Iran nuclear deal their favorites for the prize.

Sveen chose the foreign ministers for Iran and the EU and the former US Secretary of State John Kerry as the people who were all “central in the negotiations leading up to the agreement” and thus best-suited to accept the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the pact.

Urdal included just Iran’s Mohamad Javad Zarif and the EU’s Federica Mogherini, to focus on their important contributions and signal that such deals don’t depend on US support.

“It’s not a criticism of Kerry,” Urdal, a Norwegian scholar who specializes in studying armed conflict and its consequences, said at a meeting with foreign correspondents in Oslo on Wednesday.

He and his colleagues at PRIO simply believe the “bulk of the credit for the successful outcome” of the deal “must go to the two organizers of the negotiations,” and they were Zarif and Mogherini. For Mogherini, her achievement was a breakthrough because it represented the first major successful resolution of a conflict mediated by the EU since her EU ministerial position of “High Representative” was created in 2009.

The Norway's 'News in English' journal referred to US President Donald Trump attempts to sabotage the nuclear deal and added: Both Urdal and Sveen think a Nobel Peace Prize would send a strong signal of international support for it at a time when North Korea has emerged as a nuclear threat as well.

There were several other candidates on the “short lists” of those they think are most likely to win the prize this year. There were 318 candidates for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, including 215 individuals and 103 organizations. The prize is due to be announced on October 6.