Putting the blame for the death of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, the leader of Norwegian Nobel Committee Berit Reiss-Andersen said that the Chinese government bears a heavy responsibility for the death of Liu Xiaobo.
“We find it deeply disturbing that Liu Xiaobo was not transferred to a facility where he could receive adequate medical treatment before he became terminally ill. The Chinese Government bears a heavy responsibility for his premature death,” said Berit Reiss-Andersen.
Mourning his death, German Chancellor Angela Merkel called Liu a “courageous fighter for civil rights and freedom of expression”, while the French and U.S. governments called on China to allow Liu`s family to move around freely.
Already seriously ill, Liu, a thorn in the ruling Communist Party`s side since he helped negotiate a deal to allow protesters to leave Tiananmen Square before troops and tanks rolled in, was moved last month from prison to a hospital in the northeastern city of Shenyang to be treated.
The Shenyang Bureau of Justice said in a brief statement on its website that Liu had suffered multiple organ failure and efforts to save him had failed.
The hospital treating him confirmed in a separate statement the cause of death. Though allowed out on medical parole he was never freed, spending his final days in the hospital surrounded by security guards.
“We find it deeply disturbing that Liu Xiaobo was not transferred to a facility where he could receive adequate medical treatment before he became terminally ill,” said Berit Reiss-Andersen in an emailed statement.
China said at the time that Liu`s award (peace prize in 2010) was an “obscenity” that should not have gone to a man it called a criminal and a subversive.
Carl von Ossietzky, a pacifist who died in 1938 in Nazi Germany`s Berlin, was the last Nobel Peace Prize winner to live out his dying days under state surveillance. United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres was “deeply saddened” by Liu`s death, a spokesman said.
“What happened to Liu Xiaobo tells the whole world about the human rights situation in China,” said pro-democracy lawmaker Leung Kwok-hung, from Hong Kong.
Source: Zee News