Open Letter to the Vietnamese Prime Minister on the occasion of the 6th ASEM Summit, Helsinki, 10-12 September 2006 : Vietnam Committee calls for effective release of all dissidents in prison or under house arrest and the abolition of anti-human rights laws in Vietnam

Mr. Vo Van Ai, President of the Paris-based Vietnam Committee on Human Rights and Vice-President of the International Federation on Human Rights (FIDH) sent an Open Letter to Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung urging him to take the opportunity of the ASEM 6 Summit to announce radical measures to gain international legitimacy and engage a process of national reconciliation in Vietnam. Prme Minister Dung is in Europe with a delegation of the Vietnamese government, and is scheduled to address the ASEM Summit on Monday (10th). The ASEM 6 Summit is held in Helsinki, Finland (which holds the current EU presidency), and gathers 38 heads of state and governments from 25 EU member states, 10 ASEAN states, China, South Korea and Japan, as well as the European Commission. The full text of the letter is below :

Dear Prime Minister,

You are visiting Europe for the ASEM 6 Summit to seek Vietnam’s integration into the world economy and reap the benefits of global trade. You come with the hope that your presence as head of Vietnam’s new leadership and the commercial opportunities offered by Vietnam will suffice to charm the Europeans, and with them the United States, and enable you to gain membership of the World Trade Organization and win Permanent Normal Trading status with the USA.

May I stress, however, that integration into the community of nations includes binding obligations, first and foremost the respect of human rights enshrined in the UN International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights to which Vietnam acceded in 1982. These basic rights are also guaranteed in the Constitution of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.

Your visit to Brussels, headquarters of the EU, and then to Helsinki, where you will speak at the ASEM 6 Summit, is cloaked in an aura of respectability, since it comes closely after a highly-publicized amnesty in which four prisoners of conscience – just four out of over 5,000 – were released in Vietnam.

But your visit also comes as your government launches a new assault on freedom of expression in Vietnam. In mid-August, three pro-democracy activists, Cong Thanh Do, 47, a Vietnamese-born U.S. citizen, Nguyen Hoang Long and Huynh Viet Lang were arrested in Vietnam. They were accused of “terrorism” and conspiring to launch an attack on the US Consulate in Ho Chi Minh City. However, US officials who visited the men say there is no evidence to support these bizarre and spurious claims. In fact, the “act of terrorism” which provoked your government’s ire is their use of the Internet to advocate democracy and a multiparty system in Vietnam.
Dear Prime Minister,

The arrests of pro-democracy activists and the ill-treatment of amnestied prisoners has gravely harmed your government’s reputation. They have dashed the fragile hopes of political opening that the international community and the Vietnamese placed in your leadership.

Whilst the release of all prisoners is welcome, your government’s piecemeal amnesty of prisoners of conscience is meaningless, for it comes against a backdrop of increasing legal restrictions, controls and repression by your government and the Communist Party of Vietnam. It is meaningless, for the prisoners released in your amnesty are not free. Pham Hong Son left prison on 30th August. Just one hour later, 20 Security Police surrounded his home. His telephone was cut, his mobile phone confiscated. In a gesture of horrifying inhumanity, your government rejected Pham Hong Son’s request to visit his mother, following the death of his father just one week before his release.

In Vietnam, prisoners released in amnesties are acquitted of their prison sentences, but not of the “probationary detention” sentence (Article 38 of the Vietnamese Criminal Code) handed down at their trial. They must remain under house arrest, “under the supervision and re-education of the local authorities”, denied all freedom of movement and subjected to constant Police surveillance. Like his colleagues, Pham Hong Son is not free – for the next three years, he will be a prisoner in his own home, subjected to all manner of restrictions and harassments.

This is the common plight of all former prisoners “released” by your regime. Buddhist monk Thich Thien Minh, amnestied in February 2005 after 26 years in prison for advocating religious freedom is subjected to continuous Police surveillance in the province of Bac Lieu. He has received death threats warning him to cease contacts with the media and human rights organizations. Cyber-dissident Nguyen Khac Toan, released in a New Year Amnesty in February 2006, is also under house arrest. He lives in a permanent state of insecurity, liable to be arrested at any time. He is forbidden to travel outside his local district without a permit, under penalty of a 500,000 VND fine.

Today, house arrest and other forms of extra-judicial detention have become your government’s favourite method of silencing dissidents and human rights defenders. You call it “administrative detention”, “probationary detention”, or even cynically claim detainees are “totally free” ! Whatever the name, these are all forms of arbitrary and unlawful detention, in which you hold innocent citizens without trial, denied of their basic rights and totally isolated from the outside world.

Just recently, five prominent dissidents, Hoang Tien, Nguyen Khac Toan, Nguyen Van Dai, Duong Thi Xuan and Bach Ngoc Duong, were subjected to 10 days intensive Police interrogations (12-22 August 2006) in Hanoi simply because they planned to publish an independent journal entitled “Freedom and Democracy”. Security Police raided their homes, cut off their phones, seized their computers, mobile phones and personal papers. The five dissidents are under strict surveillance, prohibited from meeting each other or travelling outside their districts. Needless to say, their journal is banned. Once again, Vietnam has trampled on the guarantees of freedom of expression and the press enshrined in its own Constitution.

Religious dissidents suffer the same restrictions and harassments. The Supreme Patriarch of the Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam (UBCV) Thich Huyen Quang, 87, and the second-ranking UBCV leader Venerable Thich Quang Do are imprisoned in their respective Monasteries, the Nguyen Thieu Monastery (Binh Dinh province) and the Thanh Minh Zen Monastery in Ho Chi Minh City.

Leaders and members of all “non-recognized” religious communities are similarly detained. The ethnic Christian Montagnards suffer particularly fierce repression, including military occupation of their villages, arbitrary arrests, forced conversions, beatings and torture.

In addition to turning each home into a potential prison, your government is also tightening legal controls on basic freedoms, in flagrant violation of international human rights law. Under the cover of vaguely-defined, catch-all offenses of “threatening national security”, “disturbing public order”, “undermining national solidarity”, “sowing divisions between religious and non-religious people”, the government and Communist Party has effectively codified political repression. The regime has even legalized arbitrary practices such as extra-judicial detention (Decree 31/CP on “administrative detention”, which empowers local Security Police to detain suspected national security offenders for up to 2 years without trial), banned public demonstrations (Decree 38/2005/ND-CP, 18 March 2005), curbed press freedom by imposing censorship and self-censorship (the Press Law) and restricting freedom of expression (Decree 56/2006/ND-CP on “Administrative Sanctions on Cultural and Information Activities”) etc…

Dear Prime Minister,

These methods of deception, hypocrisy and stealth repression will not enhance Vietnam’s international integration. On the contrary, they threaten to ostracize and isolate Vietnam from the community of nations. If you are genuinely committed to leading Vietnam back into the global community, Prime Minister, I urge you to seize the opportunity of the ASEM 6 Summit in Helsinki to announce bold and unprecedented measures, such as none of your predecessors have dared to take since the end of the Vietnam War, notably :

l to declare a General Amnesty for all the political and religious prisoners languishing in over 800 prisons and re-education camps in Vietnam. Former prisoners of conscience Nguyen Khac Toan and Thich Thien Minh counted 307 political and religious prisoners in just two of Vietnam’s prisons, Ba Sao in Nam Ha province, near Hanoi, and Z30A in Dong Nai province, near Ho Chi Minh City. This general amnesty should include prisoners detained under house arrest as well as detainees in prisons and camps, notably UBCV Supreme Patriarch Thich Huyen Quang, Very Venerable Thich Quang Do, dissident Nguyen Vu Binh ;

l to abolish “probational detention” (Article 38 of the Criminal Code) and all forms of extra-judicial detention (e.g. Decree 31/CP on “administrative detention”) and cease surveillance and harassments of all dissidents and released prisoners of conscience ;

l to immediately cease persecution of clergy and followers of “non-recognized” religious organizations (Buddhists, Hoa Hao, Cao Dai, Protestants etc…) and ethnic minority Christian H’mongs and Montagnards, and in particular cease repression against the members of UBCV Representative Boards in 17 cities and provinces of Vietnam ;

l to re-establish the legitimate status of all “non-recognized” religions, in particular the outlawed Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam, and return all property confiscated since 1975 ;

l to usher in a new era of national reconciliation by proclaiming a “National Day of Contrition for the Communist Party of Vietnam” as proposed by UBCV Patriarch Thich Huyen Quang in April 2000, so the CPV may repent and seek forgiveness for past crimes against the people of Vietnam.