January 4th, 2012
Vietnamese journalist Nguyen Van Khuong was
arrested this week on suspicion of bribery after he ran an expose on corruption among traffic police in his newspaper, Tuoi Tre. The reporter is said to have paid a bribe of 15 million dong (458 GBP) to a police officer to secure the release of an impounded vehicle. The officer in question was arrested after Khuong’s story was published, and Khuong was suspended by the paper on 3 December. Tuoi Tre
quoted him as saying he had made an error in gathering evidence for a series of stories about police corruption, but he did not say he had provided the bribe.
November 29th, 2011
A
Vietnamese court have
halved the jail sentence of a blogger after international pressure from government’s and NGO’s. Pham Minh Hoang was sentenced to three years imprisonment for attempted subversion in August this year after he wrote 33 articles under a pseudonym, which were ruled by the court to ”blacken the image of the country” and aimed to topple the government. Hoang will be released on January 13 after serving a 17-month sentence, but will then serve three years of house arrest.
October 4th, 2011
October 4, 2011
Nguyen Tan Dung
Socialist Republic of Vietnam
Office of the State
1 Bach Thao
Hanoi, Vietnam
CC:
French Foreign Ministry
Alain Juppé
Ministere des Affaires etrangeres
37, Quai d’Orsay
75351 Paris
France
Dear Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung,
We, international digital freedom and human rights organizations, call on the Government of Vietnam to release blogger, human rights defender, and lecturer Pham Minh Hoang.
Mr Hoang, a dual French-Vietnamese citizen sentenced on August 10 to three years in prison and an additional three years house arrest, is a well-known blogger whose articles on education, the environment, and Vietnamese sovereignty in respect to China have been widely read. He is also a lecturer in applied mathematics at the Ho Chi Minh City Polytechnic Institute, an activist campaigning against bauxite mining by Chinese firms, and has participated in conferences on Vietnam’s sovereignty over the Paracel and Spratly Islands. Mr Hoang has worked tirelessly to promote human rights and to empower and encourage civic participation among his pupils and peers.
At Mr Hoang’s trial, Judge Vu Phi Long ruled that his writings had “blackened the image of the country” and were “aimed at overthrowing the people’s government.” Mr. Hoang, on the contrary, has claimed that he was exercising his free speech and was unaware that he had committed any crimes.
We would like to remind the Government of Vietnam that Mr Hoang’s blogging activities, as well as his activism, are guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN Declaration on Human Rights Defenders, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which Vietnam is a party to, as well as by Articles 35, 50, 53, and 69 of the Vietnamese Constitution.
We call on Vietnamese authorities to recognize Mr. Hoang’s right to expression, and to lift any charges or convictions related to his protected expressive activities, and — with these charges lifted — to ensure his release.
Signed,
Action des chrétiens pour l’abolition de la torture
ARTICLE 19
Committee of Concerned Scientists
Committee to Protect Journalists
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Front Line Defenders
Index on Censorship
PEN International
Reporters Without Borders
Scholars at Risk
August 30th, 2011
On 2 September, the
Vietnamese government
granted amnesty to 10,000 detainees, including blogger Nguyen Van Tinh and poet Tran Duch Thach, in celebration of the nation’s 66th anniversary of independence. The pair were convicted of “propaganda against the socialist state”
for hanging pro-democracy banners in Haiphong in October 2009. Tinh was handed a three and a half year sentence for the crime, while Thach was sentenced to three years.
August 23rd, 2011
Eight anti-China demonstrators in Hanoi who ignored government orders to end a series of protests
remain in custody for investigation into causing public disorder. They were among the
47 detained at the rally on Sunday — the tenth of its kind in the
Vietnamese capital — in which protesters objected to China’s supposed invasion of South China Sea waters, where the two nations have a longstanding sovereignty dispute.
August 22nd, 2011
Hackers
launched a sustained attack against pro-democracy website
Viet Tan on 13 August in a denial-of-service (DDoS) operation. Of the 77,000 IP addresses employed, 73 per cent originated from
Vietnam. The Hanoi government’s firewall on www.viettan.org was lifted so that the network relying on computers from the country could take down the site. Viet Tan has been constantly blocked by Vietnamese censors, with web users in the country requiring proxies or other circumvention tools to access the site.
August 10th, 2011
A
Vietnamese court today
sentenced French-Vietnamese activist Pham Minh Hoang to three years in prison on subversion charges for “carrying out activities aimed at overthrowing the people’s administration.” Authorities say he posted several anti-government articles online, and had ties to Viet Tan, a pro-democracy group that is banned in Vietnam. He also faces three years of house arrest following the end of his prison term.
August 5th, 2011
Catholic blogger Paulus Le Son was
arrested in Hanoi yesterday during a major police operation targeting around 10 Catholics. Reports suggest Son’s arrest, his second this year, is linked to his attempts to cover court proceedings against cyber-dissident
Cu Huy Ha Vu, who is currently appealing against his seven-year jail term for disseminating anti-government propaganda, having advocated a multi-party system.
Vietnam was ranked 165th out of 178 countries in Reporters Without Borders’ 2010
press freedom index.
