Vietnam Continues to Persecute Human Rights Defenders, Targeting Their Children

By Defend the Defenders, January 20, 2017

Authorities in many Vietnamese localities are continuing persecution and intimidation against local human rights defenders, targeting their children, the victims have claimed.

Tran Thi Nga, a human rights defender in the northern province of Ha Nam said local authorities have sent plainclothes police officers to station near her private residence in Phu Ly city. The police officers, with masks on their faces, have stopped her every time she attempted to go out with her two children.

Nga, who is very active in helping workers fight for their rights, as well as land petitioners, reported that on January 19-20, after she asked her neighbor to take her two children to the city’s center to buy foodstuff, plainclothes agents stopped the neighbor’s motorbike with the two children, who are four and six respectively.

Activist Truong Minh Tam in the same province said police also forced him to stay inside his house in Thursday and Friday. He suggested that local security forces do not want him and Nga to go out while they arrested local land petitioner Tran Thi Mien on charges of “causing public disorder.”

Both Tam and Nga have been under constant persecution of the authorities in Ha Nam and Vietnam’s police. They were brutally beaten and detained many times while covering news on human rights violations and environmental issues or participating in peaceful demonstrations in Hanoi and other localities.

Meanwhile, security forces in the central province of Nghe An arrested former prisoner of conscience Nguyen Van Oai, accusing him of resisting on-duty state officials and leaving the locality without asking permission from the local authorities during his probation period. His friends announced that Oai was kidnapped by Hoang Mai town police late during the night of January 19 while he went fishing near his village.

In 2011, Oai and 13 other young Catholic followers in Nghe An were arrested and charged with conducting activities aiming to overthrow the government under Article 79 of the country’s Penal Code. He was sentenced to four years in jail and an additional three years under house arrest. He completed his term and was released on August 3, 2015 but he remains under probation until August 2018.

Last week, Dang Xuan Dieu, an activist from the same group who was sentenced to 13 years in jail, was freed but forced into exile in France. Others, including Ho Duc Hoa and Nguyen Dang Minh Man, are still in prison on 13-year and 9-year sentences respectively.

Vietnamese communists, who have ruled the country for decades, vow to keep the country under one-party rule. The communist government has applied a series of measures to silence government critics, social activists and human rights advocates, including arrests and lengthy prison sentences, kidnappings and physical attacks, detention and house arrest as well as individual economic blockade.

Many foreign governments, including the U.S., Australia, the UK and Germany, as well as international human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have called on Vietnam to end its persecution of local activists; however, the situation has not improved much.