Vietnam Ignores Petition, Denies Citizenship Rights to Detained Former RFA
Blogger
Authorities say that Nguyen Tuong Thuy, as a prisoner, is technically not a
citizen.
RFA | 2021-09-08
Authorities in Vietnam have rejected petition letters calling for an
investigation into legal proceedings against detained blogger Nguyen Tuong Thuy,
who is serving an 11-year sentence for writing articles online that criticized
Vietnam’s one-party communist government, his family told RFA.
The petition was rejected on the grounds that Thuy, as a prisoner, technically
does not have the rights of a citizen of Vietnam.
Thuy, a former vice president of the Vietnam Independent Journalism Association
(IJAVN), had blogged on civil rights and freedom of speech issues for RFA’s
Vietnamese Service for six years, and visited the United States in 2014 to
testify before the House of Representatives on media freedom problems in
Vietnam.
Arrested in May 2020, Thuy was indicted along with two other IJAVN members Pham
Chi Dung and Le Huu Minh Tuan on Nov. 10 for “making, storing, and disseminating
documents and materials for anti-state purposes” under Article 117 of Vietnam’s
Penal Code. He was sentenced to 11 years in prison along with Tuan, while Dung
was given 15 years.
Thuy’s wife Nguyen Thi Lan told RFA’s Vietnamese Service Wednesday that her
husband had called home from the An Phuoc Detention Center in the southern
province of Binh Duong a day earlier.
“He sounded very unhappy. He had asked the detention center to send his petition
letters to the procuracy and other agencies… In their responses, the authorities
said that in a way, he did not have citizenship rights. This is ridiculous and
unreasonable,” she said.
“The authorities did, however, suggest that he request an appeal to reconsider
the court decision if he did not agree with it. They said his petition was not
valid because he no longer had necessary citizen rights to file it,” said Lan.
RFA’s website features many articles written by Thuy, including a series of
reports about death-row prisoner Ho Duy Hai, whose harsh sentence has been
criticized by legal experts.
Thuy also wrote reports depicting the plight of people involved in land disputes
against developers or the government, and refuted government reports on the
anniversary of the 1975 fall of Saigon that mocked Vietnamese people who fled
the country then to escape the Communist regime.
Thuy, born in 1950, joined the North Vietnamese army in 1970, retiring after 22
years of service. Over the past 10 years he wrote many articles and managed a
popular personal blog that has generated over for million page visits.
Vietnam, with a population of 99 million people, has been consistently rated
“not free” in the areas of internet and press freedom by Freedom House, a
U.S.-based watchdog group.
Dissent is not tolerated in the communist nation, and authorities routinely use
a set of vague provisions in the penal code to detain dozens of writers and
bloggers.
Reported by RFA’s Vietnamese Service. Translated by Anna Vu. Written in English
by Eugene Whong.
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