The Missing Recipient.

The Nobel Peace Prize Committee just formally awarded its 2010 prize to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo in a ceremony in Oslo.  Xiaobo, who is being honored for his pro-democracy activism, is currently in a Chinese prison and was not able to attend the ceremony.

Here's how the New York Times covered the event--

    The chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Thorbjorn Jagland, next to the empty chair where Liu Xiaobo would have sat. 

December 10, 2010

Winner’s Chair Remains Empty at Nobel Event

By SARAH LYALL

OSLO — Imprisoned and incommunicado in China, the Chinese writer and dissident Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, his absence marked at the prize ceremony here by an empty chair.

For the first time since the 1935 prize, when the laureate, Carl von Ossietzky, languished in a concentration camp and Hitler forbade any sympathizers to attend the ceremony, no relative or representative of the winner was present to accept the award or the $1.5 million check it comes with. Nor was Mr. Liu able to provide a speech, even in absentia.

Guests at the ceremony in Oslo’s City Hall listened instead to a recitation of his defiant yet gentle statement to a Chinese court before his incarceration last year. “I have no enemies and no hatred,” Mr. Liu said in "I Have No Enemies: My Final Statement to the Court," read aloud by the Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann. “Hatred can rot away at a person’s intelligence and conscience.”

Through his wife, Liu Xia, Mr. Liu sent word that he wanted to dedicate the award to the “lost souls” massacred in 1989 in Tiananmen Square.

Mr. Liu, 54, a professor, poet, essayist and campaigner for human rights, has been an irritant to the Chinese authorities since helping resolve confrontations between the police and students in Tiananmen Square. Mr. Liu was detained in December 2008, after co-writing the Charter 08 call for human rights and reform, and is currently serving an 11-year sentence for the crime of “incitement to the overthrow of the state power and socialist system and the people’s democratic dictatorship.”

He was named this year’s laureate because of his heroic and nonviolent struggles on behalf of democracy and human rights, said Thorbjorn Jagland, chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, adding that China needed to learn that with economic power came social and political responsibility.

“We can to a certain degree say that China with its 1.3 billion people is carrying mankind’s fate on its shoulders,” Mr. Jagland said in a speech at the ceremony. “If the country proves capable of developing a social market economy with full civil rights, this will have a huge favorable impact on the world.”

He added, “Many will ask whether China’s weakness — for all the strength the country is currently showing — is not manifested in the need to imprison a man for 11 years merely for expressing his opinions on how his country should be governed.”

The Tiananmen Square mentioned in the above article refers to the site in Beijing of a massive pro-democracy rally held in 1989 that was violently suppressed by government security forces. 

And here's a video clip from the Associated Press--