The Nobel Committee's own institutional historian groups Ossietzky and Sakharov as controversial prizes later vindicated — a third, independent instance of the pairing

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Geir Lundestad, Secretary of the Norwegian Nobel Committee from 1990 to 2014, wrote the Committee's own commissioned 100-year institutional history, "The Nobel Peace Prize, 1901-2000," published as a chapter of The Nobel Prize: The First 100 Years (2001) and hosted on the Foundation's own site. Summarizing the record, Lundestad writes: "In historical hindsight, several of the more controversial prizes are now considered among the most successful ones (Ossietzky, Lutuli, Sakharov, the Dalai Lama, Gorbachev)."

This groups Ossietzky and Andrei Sakharov under a different category than the "prevented from attending" narrative of the 2010 ceremony speech and the 2017 "heritage" statement: here it is "controversial-when-awarded, vindicated-in-hindsight." It is a third occasion, independently authored and occasioned, on which the institution's own writing places the two laureates in the same category. Historical/definitional groupings of this kind clear the sourcing floor at Tier 3-4, but this source is itself Tier 1 (the Committee's own institutional historian, on the Foundation's own site), so no downgrade applies. Taken with the other two instances, the Ossietzky-Sakharov pairing recurs across at least three separately authored, separately occasioned pieces of the Committee's own writing spanning 2001 to 2017 — the 2017 sentence reads as the latest instance of a standing institutional narrative, not a one-off rhetorical flourish.