ICC Note:
In 2008 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Liu Xiaobo, was arrested and charged with “inciting subversion of power.” Liu is an advocate for human rights and religious freedom in China, and after serving 9 years of an 11-year sentence, he was freed. However, in late May, Liu was diagnosed with liver cancer after the prison continually denied him adequate medical treatment. Although, Liu wants to travel to the United States for better medical treatment, but he is still seeking full amnesty, which hinders him from traveling.
07/02/2017 China (RFA) – This won him international acclaim, including the highly respected Nobel Peace Prize, but it also put him in the bad books of Zhou Yongkang, former member of the Politburo standing committee and minister for public security, and he was sentenced to 11 years in jail.
Any discussion of the matter has been forbidden under socialism-with-Chinese-characteristics, and so I won’t be talking about that today.
Liu Xiaobo is now seriously ill.
He wasn’t informed that he had liver cancer until it was in its late stages, when he had already been in jail for more than eight years.
Is this a reliable basis for assessing the level of medical care that is currently available in China? Or does it have more to do with the authorities playing God with a human life? It is impossible to investigate this question fully in today’s China, so I won’t be talking about that here, either.
All I know is that it’s for fate to decide when a person lives or dies, and that you sometimes have to move faster to save a life than you do to put out a fire. One cannot afford to lose a single day, a single hour, even. It must be given urgent priority.
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