The Chinese Foreign Ministry warned yesterday against giving a Nobel Peace Prize to leading jailed dissident Liu Xiaobo (劉曉波), a nomination made by the US chapter of rights group International Pen.
A Chinese court jailed Liu, a prominent critic of Chinese Communist Party rule, for 11 years on Christmas Day on a subversion charge after he co-authored Charter 08, a petition calling for broad political and democratic reforms.
Pen American Center president Kwame Anthony Appiah last week sent a nomination for Liu to the Norwegian Nobel Committee, noting his “distinguished and principled leadership in the area of human and political rights and freedom of expression.”
Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu (馬朝旭) said it would be a mistake to give Liu such an award.
“If the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded to such a person, it is obvious that it is totally wrong,” Ma told a regular news briefing in Beijing, without elaborating.
Liu is a member of the Chinese chapter of Pen, which campaigns for freedom of expression.
“Honoring [Liu] with the Nobel Peace Prize would be a powerful way to underscore the fact that the rights that are enshrined in international human rights law — values that China has acknowledged and endorsed — are the non-negotiable entitlements of every man and woman,” Appiah said in a statement.
The group said the nomination letter had been signed by other Pen members and well-known authors, including Salman Rushdie, Philip Roth and Ha Jin (哈金).
Japan has started its first nationwide survey of animal cafes amid concerns over animal welfare, hygiene and public health, a government official said, bringing greater scrutiny to the popular but lightly regulated sector. The desktop survey, which began this month, will examine the number of facilities, the types of animals they house and the conditions they are held in, and how visitors interact with the animals. Exotic animal cafes, where visitors can interact with species ranging from otters to owls and marmots, have become popular attractions for Japanese and foreign tourists. However, researchers say some facilities keep threatened species, raising
STRAIN ON TIES: The police arrested a 20-year-old man who matched the description of a suspect caught on CCTV leaving a hotel in Naha with the victim’s belongings A US Marine stationed on Japan’s southern island of Okinawa was arrested on suspicion of the murder of a Japanese woman, police said yesterday. The suspect “killed the 39-year-old woman at a hotel in Naha and stole her wallet on Saturday,” a local police spokesman said. US Ambassador George Glass posted on social media that he had spoken with Japan’s foreign ministry and Okinawa’s governor to offer “our sincere condolences and pledging full cooperation as the investigation continues.” Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi called the crime “exceptionally brutal and vicious” on X. The government has urged the US “to provide maximum cooperation
A US lawmaker has called on Starbucks to close its first stores in Xinjiang, China, calling it a “morally bankrupt decision” to do business in a region where Uighurs face repression. China denies widespread accusations about abuses of the Uighurs, a mainly Muslim people, saying its policies there were aimed at combating terrorism, separatism and religious extremism. Starbucks opened its first two stores this week in Xinjiang’s capital, Urumqi, including one at the city centre’s grand bazaar and a second at its international airport. John Moolenaar, chairman of the Select Committee on China of the House of Representatives, called on Starbucks to “immediately
A shark stranded in a canal in the South Korean port of Busan has become the country’s latest wildlife sensation, with the city saying about 600,000 people have flocked to see it over the past two weeks. The 3.5m shark was first spotted in a narrow waterway in North Port on Sept. 18. As the days passed without the shark finding its way back to the ocean, authorities on Tuesday launched a rescue operation to guide it out, but the effort failed. The South Korean Coast Guard and other agencies deployed vessels to spray jets of water behind the shark
RSS