Norway: China cancels meeting, days after Nobel

[October 11, 2010]  BEIJING (AP) -- Norway said Monday that China has called off a meeting with the Norwegian fisheries minister just days after Beijing warned that the Nobel Peace Prize award to a jailed Chinese dissident would harm relations between the countries.

The move was announced a day after Liu Xiaobo, the imprisoned democracy campaigner, was allowed a brief, tearful meeting with his wife, during which he dedicated the award to the "lost souls" of the 1989 military crackdown on student demonstrators.

Liu, a slight, 54-year-old literary critic, is in the second year of an 11-year prison term for inciting subversion.

Beijing had reacted angrily to Friday's announcement honoring Liu, calling him a criminal and warning Norway's government that relations would suffer, even though the Nobel committee is an independent organization.

The Norwegian Minister of Fisheries and Coastal Affairs Lisbeth Berg-Hansen arrived in China on Monday for a weeklong visit to the World Expo in Shanghai, said the Norwegian ministry's spokesman Magnus Hodne.

Berg-Hansen was supposed to meet with China's vice minister for fisheries on Wednesday but the Chinese canceled the meeting, Hodne said, adding he did not know the reason.

In naming him, the Norwegian-based Nobel committee honored Liu's more than two decades of advocacy of human rights and peaceful democratic change -- from demonstrations for democracy at Beijing's Tiananmen Square in 1989 to a manifesto for political reform that he co-authored in 2008 and which led to his latest jail term.

Also Monday, four U.N. human rights experts released a statement calling for China to immediately release Liu.

The independent U.N.-appointed investigators say Liu is "a courageous human rights defender who has continuously and peacefully advocated for greater respect for human rights" in China.

Frank La Rue, El Hadji Malick Sow, Margaret Sekaggya and Gabriela Knaul -- who examine issues ranging from breaches of the right to free speech to arbitrary detention -- called on China to release Liu and "all persons detained for peacefully exercising their right to freedom of expression."

European diplomats, meanwhile, were prevented from visiting Liu's wife, who has been living under house arrest since Friday. Liu Xia has been told that if she wants to leave her home she must be escorted in a police car, the New York-based group Human Rights in China said.

Simon Sharpe, the first secretary of political affairs of the EU delegation in China, said he wanted to see Liu Xia at her home in Beijing to personally deliver a letter of congratulations on the peace award from the president of the European Commission.

Sharpe was accompanied by diplomats from about 10 embassies, including Switzerland, Sweden, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Belgium, Italy and Australia.

But three uniformed guards at the main gate of Liu's apartment complex prevented the group from entering, saying someone from inside the building had to come out and fetch them.

"We were told that we could only go in if we called somebody from the inside and if they came out to meet us. But of course, we can't call Liu Xia, because it's impossible to get through to her phone," Sharpe told reporters at the entrance to the compound.

Sharpe read out a message from Jose Manuel Barroso that said the decision to award Liu the peace prize was "a strong message of support to all those around the world who sometimes with great personal sacrifice are struggling for freedom and human rights."

Liu Xia has said via Twitter that she has been unable to make phone calls, and Sharpe noted that made it impossible to reach her.

The Beijing public security bureau and the foreign ministry had no immediate comment on why authorities were apparently restricting the movements of Liu Xia, who has not been charged with anything. But "soft detention" is a common tactic used by the Chinese government to intimidate and muffle activists and critics.

In Australia, Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd said Monday he would raise to Chinese authorities Canberra's objections to the 11-year prison sentence imposed on Liu and to restrictions placed on the movements of the dissident's wife.

[Associated Press; By GILLIAN WONG]

Associated Press writers Tini Tran, Ken Teh and Isolda Morillo in Beijing, and Louise Nordstrom in Stockholm contributed to this report.

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