Another member of the Nobel Committee explains the decision to award the Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo. From the Guardian:
Geir Lundestad of the Norwegian Nobel committee confirmed speculation that the unusually tough sentence made Liu an obvious choice. He said Beijing’s decision “solved the problem” of how to recognise Chinese activists.
He said the judges had gradually come to believe they had to “address the China question”.
“If we had given a prize to a dissident from Cuba or Vietnam, fine, there are difficult situations in those countries,” he said during a talk at Oxford University. “But the question would then be: why don’t you address China?
“And we felt that the credibility of the prize depended on this – we had to address this issue – despite the complexities that this would involve.”
