NORWAY: CHINA DISSIDENT WEI NOMINATED FOR 1997 PEACE PRIZE.

By Tanya Pang

Reuter, 31 January 1997

- A little-known European party fighting for human rights in China said on Friday it had nominated jailed Chinese dissident Wei Jingsheng for the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize. The 4,000-member Transnational Radical Party (TRP) said it had collected 1,084 signatures around the world from parliamentarians, academics, Nobel laureates and members of government to support the nomination. Olivier Dupuis, TRP general secretary and a member of the European Parliament, was in the Norwegian capital to give the petition to the Norwegian Nobel Committee. True to its commitment not to reveal the names of Nobel candidates, the committee would not confirm the nomination had been received.

"China is one of the biggest challenges for humanity. More than one billion people living there do not have the right to speak or think for themselves, or fight for democracy," Dupuis told Reuters. "Wei has been fighting since 1979. He is the best symbol of resistance, of the struggle for freedom and democracy."

Headquartered in Brussels, but with main offices in Rome, Budapest, Moscow and New York, TRP's party platform is for freedom for Tibet and democracy in China, establishment of a permanent international criminal court, worldwide abolishment of the death penalty, legalisation of banned drugs to undermine organised crime and linguistic democracy. Wei, regarded as the father of China's tiny democracy movement, has, spent most of the last 20 years in prison for his outspoken comments on human rights and politics. He was given a 14-year jail term in 1995 for financing the democracy movement. The 49-year-old has been nominated to the Nobel Committee several times before and in 1996 he was honoured by the European Parliament with the Sakharov prize for freedom of thought, whose previous winners include South African President Nelson Mandela and Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi -- both of whom later became peace laureates. "With China taking control over Hong Kong this year I think China will be high on the

international agenda and hopefully in the minds of the Nobel Committee," Dupuis said. He said former peace prize winners South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Argentine human rights campaigner Adolfo Perez Esquivel and Mairead Corrigan, one of the leaders of a Northern Ireland peace movement, had signed the nomination. Last year's Peace award went to Roman Catholic Bishop Carlos Belo and self-exiled activist Jose Ramos Horta for their work towards peace and reconciliation in Indonesiaruled East Timor. The 1997 award will be announced in October, with the prize-giving cermonyheld on December 1 0, the anniversary of the death of the prize's founder Alfred Nobel.

(c) Reuters Limited 1997 REUTER NEWS SERVICE