Liu’s Nobel ceremony to be in absentia

This year’s Nobel Peace Prize ceremony, in honour of jailed Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, will mark only the second time in the prize’s history that neither the laureate nor a representative will be able to come accept the award.

This year’s Nobel Peace Prize ceremony, in honour of jailed Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, will mark only the second time in the prize’s history that neither the laureate nor a representative will be able to come accept the award.

HT Image

Three famous laureates, Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi, Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov and Polish activist Lech Walesa, were all unable to attend their ceremonies, but they each had family members pick up their award for them.

The only true precedent for this year’s event, when Liu’s chair will symbolically be left empty and no award will be handed over, was when German journalist and pacifist Carl von Ossietzky won the 1935 prize. Imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp, Ossietzky was unable to make the trip to Oslo.