Last Updated: Tuesday, December 16, 2014 – 17:53
Stockholm: Chinese pro-democracy activist Xu Youyu, who was among key signatories of a 2008 manifesto seeking sweeping political reforms in China, was awarded Sweden`s Olof Palme human rights prize on Tuesday.
“He has worked consistently for a democratisation of Chinese society, while condemning any form of violence as a political method,” the Stockholm-based Olof Palme Memorial Fund said in a statement.
“Through his research and dialogue-oriented debate articles, Xu Youyu has made a great contribution to the peaceful and democratic development in China.”
Born in 1947, Xu is a philosophy professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Science and was one of the most prominent signatories of the 2008 Charter 08 manifesto that urged a series of reforms in China.
He was detained in May this year in a crackdown on dissent ahead of the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
The Olof Palme Prize is an annual prize worth $75,000 granted by the Swedish labour movement. It commemorates the memory of the Nordic country`s Social Democratic prime minister, an outspoken international human rights advocate, who was assassinated in the Swedish capital in 1986.
