Mo Shaoping said many people had been stopped from leaving the country recently A Chinese lawyer who represents jailed Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo says he has been prevented from leaving the country.
Mo Shaoping says he was stopped by border police at Beijing airport, and told that if he were allowed to leave it could “threaten state security”.
Mr Mo says he was on his way to a lawyers’ conference in London.
But he says authorities suspected he could have been planning to receive the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of Liu.
China has reacted with fury to the awarding of the Nobel prize to Liu, who was sentenced to 11 years in prison last December on subversion charges, after co-authoring a petition calling for political reform which was signed by thousands.
The lawyer said immigration officials had stopped him at Beijing’s airport as he prepared to board a flight to the UK to attend the conference.
“I was with a friend when we were stopped by the police on our way to board the plane,” Mr Mo told the BBC from the airport.
“We were taken to a room where we were told that we would not be allowed to travel overseas. The police told us that this could threaten state security.”
He said officials did not explicitly cite the award as the reason he was denied permission to travel, but he believed his connection to Liu was the reason he was stopped.
He said he wanted visiting British Prime Minister David Cameron to raise the issue of Liu Xiaobo while he was in China.
Mr Mo said he believed he was among a group of people who had recently been prevented from leaving China, apparently out of fear that one of them would seek to accept the award on Liu’s behalf at the 10 December ceremony in Norway.
Chinese authorities reacted with outrage to the selection of Liu by the Nobel Committee, calling it an “obscenity” and saying it was tantamount to “encouraging crime”.
Liu’s wife Liu Xia has been placed under house arrest, and diplomats in the Norwegian capital Oslo say they have received letters implicitly warning them not to attend the prize-giving.
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