Jailed Vietnamese land activist was tortured in bid to extract confession
Trinh Thi Thao says her brother was beaten to the point of
hospitalization for kidney inflammation.
RFA | 2021.10.14
Jailed Vietnamese land activist Trinh Ba Tu was brutally tortured in detention
as part of a bid by authorities to force him to plead guilty to charges of
“anti-state activities,” a relative said Thursday, prompting calls by rights
groups for an immediate investigation into his case.
Trinh Thi Thao, Tu’s elder sister, told RFA’s Vietnamese Service that she met
with her brother’s lawyers on Monday and learned that he had been so badly
beaten during an interrogation following his June 24, 2020 arrest that he
required hospitalization for kidney inflammation.
After receiving treatment, he was returned to detention and told to sign a false
statement confessing to the crime of “creating, storing, disseminating
anti-State materials” under Article 117 of Vietnam’s Criminal Code related to
posting online content critical of the government’s brutal response to a
long-running dispute over a military airport construction site about 25 miles
south of the capital Hanoi.
“My brother Tu said that the prosecutor insulted him during the
interrogation—the prosecutor’s name is Minh and he’s a prosecutor from Hoa Binh
province,” Thao said.
“During the investigation process, investigators promised Tu that if he pleaded
guilty, he would be jailed for only six years, otherwise he would have to serve
eight.”
Tu and his mother Can Thi Theu, who was arrested the same day and similarly
charged, were sentenced on May 5 to eight years in prison and three years on
probation each.
His brother Trinh Ba Phuong and another land activist named Nguyen Thi Tam were
separately arrested on June 24 on charges of propagandizing against the state
for posting online articles and livestreaming videos condemning the government
for its handling of the military airport dispute. Phuong and Tam remain in
detention pending a trial expected to begin on Nov. 4, Thao told RFA.
Speaking to RFA on Thursday, Ming Yu Hah, deputy director of London-based rights
group Amnesty International, said that if the reports of Tu’s torture are true,
the Vietnamese government must be held accountable.
“Beating by the authorities under such circumstances would likely constitute
torture or other ill treatment, which is absolutely prohibited by international
law,” she said, adding that Tu should never have been convicted and sentenced in
the first place.
“These serious allegations of torture and ill treatment must be investigated by
the Vietnamese authorities immediately and the perpetrators must be brought to
justice without delay.”
Ming Yu Hah noted that Tu, Theu, and Phuong are all recognized as prisoners of
conscience by Amnesty International and called for them to be freed.
“They have committed no recognizable crimes and have instead been punished for
raising awareness of human rights violations committed by the Vietnamese
Government,” she said. “They must be released immediately and unconditionally.”
Trinh Ba Tu and his mother Can Thi Theu, who Thao told RFA in July were being
held in solitary confinement at a detention center in nearby Hoa Binh province,
are currently awaiting a trial to appeal their convictions. The two have also
been refused family visits since their trial, although authorities have yet to
explain why.
Dong Tam incident
On Jan. 9, 2020, around 3,000 security officers conducted a raid on Dong Tam
commune’s Hoanh hamlet to intervene in a long-running dispute over a military
airport construction site about 25 miles south of Vietnam’s capital, Hanoi.
Dong Tam village elder Le Dinh Kinh, 84, was shot and killed by police during
the operation, and Kinh’s sons Le Dinh Chuc and Le Dinh Cong were sentenced to
death on Sept. 14, 2020 in connection with the deaths of three police officers
who were also killed in the clash.
In an earlier flare-up of the Dong Tam dispute that goes back to 1980, farmers
detained 38 police officers and local officials during a weeklong standoff in
April 2017. Three months later, the Hanoi Inspectorate rejected the farmer’s
claims that 47 hectares (116 acres) of their farmland were seized for the
military-run Viettel Group—Vietnam’s largest mobile phone operator—without
adequate compensation.
While all land in Vietnam is ultimately held by the state, land confiscations
have become a flashpoint as residents accuse the government of pushing small
landholders aside in favor of lucrative real estate projects, and of paying too
little in compensation.
International organizations have voiced concern about the Dong Tam case, calling
on the Vietnamese government to hold an independent and transparent
investigation.
According to Paris-based media watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF), state
media in Vietnam are highly restricted, leaving bloggers and independent
journalists as “the only sources of independently reported information” in the
country, despite being subjected to “ever-harsher forms of persecution.”
Measures taken against them now include assaults by plainclothes police, RSF
said in its 2021 Press Freedoms Index, which placed Vietnam at 175 out of 180
countries surveyed worldwide, a ranking unchanged from last year.
“To justify jailing them, the Party resorts to the criminal codes, especially
three articles under which ‘activities aimed at overthrowing the government,’
‘anti-state propaganda’ and ‘abusing the rights to freedom and democracy to
threaten the interests of the state’ are punishable by long prison terms,” the
rights group said.
Vietnam’s already low tolerance of dissent deteriorated sharply last year with a
spate of arrests of independent journalists, publishers, and Facebook
personalities as authorities continued to stifle critics in the run-up to the
ruling Communist Party Congress in January. But arrests continue in 2021.
Reported by RFA’s Vietnamese Service. Translated by Anna Vu. Written in English
by Joshua Lipes.
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