Prince Harry, Meghan Markle face strong backlash after being named for a prestigious award

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have been branded "sublimely ridiculous"  after being listed for a prestigious human rights gong, the Ripple of Hope Award.

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex nomination for the award has even left a historian baffled. While, some royal fans and experts have also expressed their anger and questioned why they are being awarded.

Kerry Kennedy, president of Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, said Harry and Meghan and their "willingness to speak up and change the narrative on racial justice and mental health" across the world "embody the type of moral courage that my father once called the 'one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change a world that yields most painfully to change'."

With this choice, the organisation, named after the younger brother of US President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, honours work by the royal couple  through their non-profit Archewell Foundation. 

However, Professor David Nasaw, author of Pulitzer Prize-nominated book The Patriarch about President Kennedy's father, described their nomination as "absurd".

"I find it somewhere between sublimely ridiculous and blatantly ludicrous. It's absurd," he told the Mail on Sunday.

"If you look at the people who have been awarded the Robert Kennedy prize in the past – Bill and Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Bishop Desmond Tutu – and then you have to ask what are Harry and Meghan doing here?

"What in God's name have they done to merit this? What percentage of Harry and Meghan's wealth is going to worthy causes?"

He went on saying that the Kennedys' patriarch Joseph, an Irish Catholic, would be turning in his grave to see branches of his family "latching on to British Royalty".

The recipients of the Ripple of Hope Award will gather in New York on December 6, just week after Kate Middleton and Meghan Prince William's arrival in Boston for this year's Earthshot Prize award ceremony.