Supporters of the late Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo held a memorial ceremony in Germany on Sunday to mark the figurative date that the Nobel Prize winner was due to be released from prison.

“He would have been free, only if he was still with us,” said Roland Kuhne, a priest who organised the ceremony outside the Chinese Embassy in Berlin. The 12-hour marathon event saw participants reading out Liu’s work and those of other human rights activists in China.

The 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner died of liver cancer in 2017 while he was on medical parole during an 11-year jail term for “subversion of state power”. He was sentenced in 2009 after co-authoring Charter 08, a political manifesto calling for an end to one-party rule in China and supporting full-fledged democracy.

Liu was a prominent activist in China who was jailed several times, including a 21-month term following the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre for his role in supporting students who had taken part in protests. He was jailed again from 1996-1999 for criticizing China’s policies towards Taiwan and Tibet’s spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama.

Liu’s widow, Liu Xia, did not participate in the memorial service. She was permitted to travel to Germany in 2018 for medical treatment after nearly a decade under house arrest.

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