Lawyer faces police’s retaliation

 

VNRN – December 18, 2014

 

158 Vietnamese bloggers domestic and abroad on Monday handed a collective letter to the local police, prosecutors, court and bar association, announcing their support for Vo An Don, defending lawyer for a victim of police brutality last April. Mr. Don may have his license revoked following a request by the police, prosecutors and court of Tuy Hoa city, where the trial took place eight months ago.

In a response to the collective request by Tuy Hoa’s authorities, the bloggers, quoting the ethical code of Vietnamese lawyers, confirmed that Mr. Don had acted “in the proper administration of justice,” and urged the authorities to “stop all forms of harassment against lawyer Don.”

Mr. Don represented the family of Ngo Thanh Kieu, who was beaten to death  two years ago by a group of five police officers during interrogation. The court on April 3 gave suspended sentences to two perpetrators. The other three received quite light sentences for “applying corporal punishment.” None was prosecuted for murder.

The verdict, which looked like a criminal cover-up, aroused public anger in both mainstream media and cyberspace.

Local police, however, added more fuel to the fire on December 4 when they co-signed with local court and prosecutors a request for the revocation of counseling license against Vo An Don, the lawyer representing the victim’s family.

The collective request wrote, “During the trial court between March 26 and April 3, lawyer Vo An Don took advantage of his occupation and used indecent language to insult the participants in the proceedings and incumbent political leaders in the administration.”

The signers also accused lawyer Don of “having many articles, interviews and comments published on social media networks and domestic and international fora, in which he provided a lot of misleading information and unlawful opinions that fail to fulfill lawyers’ social responsibilities.”

They concluded that lawyer Don “created a bad focal point for public opinion, thus harming political security and social order in the province.”

Mr. Dinh Van Que, former chief judge of the Supreme Criminal Court, wrote in an article on the Ho Chi Minh City Legal Daily of December 7 that the allegations were totally unfounded for they failed to identify any “indecent language” or anyone targeted by lawyer Don.

 

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