Writer Nguyen Xuan Nghia Completes His Six-year Jail Sentence

 

 

Defend the Defenders

Sept 13, 2014

 

On Sept 11, writer Nguyen Xuan Nghia, a member of the political opposition bloc 8406 completed his six-year imprisonment under charge of “conducting propaganda against the state” according to Article 88 of the Criminal Code. However, he will have to be under a three-year probation period or house arrest which bans him from going out of his home area.

He said he was put on solitary cell two times, three months each. The prison authorities put him in a four-square-meter cell without any information and banned from receiving donations from his family.

Receiving nothing from him by imposing solitary cell, Vietnam’s government transferred him in Nigh An province, where he shared a room with prominent political prisoner Nguyen Van Hai (aka Dieu Cay) and the duo worked together to protect inmates in the prison.

Mr. Hai held a 33-day hunger strike to protest the prison’s inhuman treatment after the prison’s authorities accepted the accusation of two people imprisoned for spying for China. The two spies accused that Mr. Hai conducted propaganda against the state.

Mr. Nghia said he and other prisoners in the facility knew well about Hai’s hunger strike from the first day to the final 33rd day. After Hai ended the strike, prison authorities filmed him when he took dinner and broadcast on television, saying Hai did not conduct any hunger strike. Vietnam’s state media is telling lies, he concluded.

During his spending in An Diem facility in Quang Nam province, he met Le Quoc Quan, a prominent democracy activist who is on his 30-month jail for fabricated tax evasion.

 

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