US lawmakers nominate Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement for the Nobel Peace Prize

Name: Mass arrests of Hong Kong opposition lawmakers, activists under national security law
Uploaded: 2021-02-03T20:16:01.000Z
Duration: 3 min 4 s
Description: Mass arrests of Hong Kong opposition lawmakers, activists under national security law

Nine lawmakers, all from the Congressional-Executive Committee on China, send a letter to the chair of the Nobel Peace Prize committee

The letter cites the national security law imposed on the city and says the movement ‘continues to fight against the erosion’ of human rights and democracy

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Protesters in Hong Kong rallying against a new national security law on July 1, 2020. US lawmakers have nominated Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement for the Nobel Peace Prize. Photo: AFP

Robert Delaneyin Washington

Published: 4:16am, 4 Feb 2021Updated: 6:43am, 4 Feb 2021

A bipartisan group of US lawmakers has nominated Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, to honour their struggle against a national security law that Beijing imposed on the city without local input, a move that is sure to anger the Chinese government.

“We are nominating a movement that has peacefully advocated for and maintained human rights and democracy in Hong Kong since 1997 and continues to fight against the erosion of these rights,” Senator Marco Rubio, a Republican, Representative James McGovern, a Democrat, and seven other lawmakers, wrote to Berit Reiss-Andersen, chair of the Nobel Peace Prize committee.

“A number of democracy advocates are already in jail, some in exile, and many more awaiting trials where they are expected to be convicted and sentenced in the coming months for the sole reason of peacefully expressing their political views through speech, publication, elections, or assembly,” the signatories, all members of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, wrote in the letter dated Sunday and made public on Wednesday.

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Mass arrests of Hong Kong opposition lawmakers, activists under national security law

The nomination by US lawmakers, some of whom have sponsored legislation supporting sanctions against Hong Kong and mainland Chinese government officials, is the latest move against these authorities by a US government that is united on few other fronts.

The bipartisan push to pressure China on human rights in recent years makes the backdrop even more contentious than when Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, who died in 2017 while serving a prison term, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010.

Liu was nominated that year by Kwame Anthony Appiah, then president of the London-based literary and human rights association Pen International.

An editorial run by the Chinese government-controlled People’s Daily after Liu was awarded the prize said: “The Nobel Committee’s awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo and seeing him as a ‘hero’ is by no means an unintentional act, but a deliberate choice.”