Furious China blocks visits to wife of Nobel laureate

China yesterday blocked European officials from meeting with the wife of the jailed Nobel Peace Prize winner, cut off her phone communication and cancelled meetings with Norwegian officials - acting on its fury over the award.

As China retaliated, UN human rights experts called on Beijing to free the imprisoned democracy campaigner Liu Xiaobo, who was permitted a brief, tearful meeting with his wife on Sunday. Mr Liu dedicated the award to the "lost souls" of the 1989 military crackdown on student demonstrators.

Mr Liu, 54, a literary critic, is in the second year of an 11-year prison term for inciting subversion. In naming him, the Norway-based Nobel committee honoured his more than two decades of advocacy of human rights and peaceful democratic change - from demonstrations for democracy at Beijing's Tiananmen Square in 1989 to a manifesto for political reform that he co-authored in 2008 and which led to his latest jail term.

Beijing had reacted angrily to Friday's announcement honouring Mr Liu, calling him a criminal and warning Norway that relations would suffer, even though the Nobel committee is an independent organisation.

Yesterday, it abruptly cancelled a meeting that had been scheduled for tomorrow between visiting Norwegian fisheries minister Lisbeth Berg-Hansen and her Chinese counterpart.

"If the meeting has been cancelled due to the Peace Prize, we find that to be an unnecessary reaction from China," said Norway's foreign ministry spokeswoman Ragnhild Imerslund.

Four UN human rights experts released a statement calling for China to immediately release Liu. The independent UN- appointed investigators, who examine issues from free speech to arbitrary detention, called on China to release Mr Liu and "all persons detained for peacefully exercising their right to freedom of expression."

European diplomats, meanwhile, were prevented from visiting his wife, Liu Xia, who has been under house arrest since Friday. Ms Liu has been told if she wants to leave her home she must be escorted in a police car.

She said that her phone and internet connections have been cut off and both her and her brother's mobile phones have apparently been interfered with.

Simon Sharpe, the first secretary of political affairs of the EU delegation in China, said he went to see her at her home in Beijing to deliver a letter of congratulations from European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso.

He was accompanied by diplomats from ten other countries, including Switzerland, Sweden, Poland, Hungary, Belgium, Italy and Australia.

But three guards at the main gate of Ms Liu's apartment complex prevented the group from entering, saying someone from inside the building had to come out and fetch them.

Chinese state media reacted furiously yesterday to the Nobel Prize.If Mr Liu's calls for a multi-party democracy in China were followed, said the Global Times, a Chinese-language tabloid: "China's fate would perhaps be no better than the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia."

The China Daily, a government English-language mouthpiece, said the award was "part of the plot to contain China" and exposed "the deep and wide ideological rift between this country and the West".