Liu Xiaobo, a Nobel peace-prize winner, is battling liver cancer

Liu Xiaobo’s “crime” was to call for democracy and urge others to support him. In 2009 that earned him an 11-year jail sentence for “inciting subversion of state power”—among the toughest penalties meted out for such an offence since it was established more than a decade previously. On June 26th it was revealed that Mr Liu will never complete his term: he is on “medical parole” undergoing treatment in hospital for terminal liver cancer. Police have rarely allowed his wife to leave her home since he was awarded the Nobel peace prize, in absentia, in 2010. But they have reportedly let her visit his sick bed. The government apparently wants to avoid the international outcry that a Nobel laureate dying behind bars, cut off from his family, would provoke. Mr Liu, however, is still not free. The authorities say he is subject to supervision by prison officials. Protesters in relatively free Hong Kong have rallied this week to demand Mr Liu’s release (above, a demonstrator there holds his picture). But on the mainland his name is largely blocked online, as are references to “Charter 08”, his call for reform. For a time, internet censors even tried to stop use of the phrase “empty chair”: the object that represented his absence at the Nobel ceremony in Oslo.