Quê Me Quê Me: Action for democracy in Vietnam & Vietnam Committee on Human Rights
Intro: Y Lan Penelope Faulkner: Amnesty International is a renowned international organisation devoted to promoting internationally recognised human rights and campaigning for the release of prisoners of conscience. It was founded in 1961 by three lawyers, Peter Berenson (UK), Sean McBride (Ireland) and Eric Baker (UK) firstly under the name Justice, then Amnesty International.
The aim of Amnesty International is to protect the rights of prisoners of conscience all over the world, irrespective of their opinions, origins or beliefs. The organisation respects the principles of independence and impartiality, and it intervenes on behalf of all prisoners of conscience, whether it agrees with their opinions or not, providing they are detained in violation of UN standards, and have not used or invoked violence.
Sean McBride, one of Amnesty International’s founders, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1974. In 1977, Amnesty International received the Nobel Peace Prize.
Today, Amnesty International has over 2.2 million members and active supporters in 150 countries. Its headquarters are based in London. Each section is assigned one or more prisoner who has been adopted by Amnesty International as a “prisoner of conscience”. The section’s members collect information on this prisoner and campaign for his/her release by writing to governments, collecting signatures or launching media campaigns. Their actions are simple, but perseverant. Thanks to these methods, Amnesty has obtained the release of numerous political prisoners from all over the world, under a range of different political regimes.
The Supreme Patriarch of the Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam Thich Huyen Quang is adopted as a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International, and several sections have worked hard for his release over many years. Amnesty’s section in Boston, Massachusetts, has campaigned for Thich Huyen Quang since 2002, sending Petitions with over 2,000 signatures to Vietnamese Ambassador Nguyen Tam Chien, and hundreds of letters to the US and Vietnamese governments in Washington calling for his immediate and unconditional release. In 2006, when Patriarch Thich Huyen Quang was seriously ill, Amnesty International in California sent thousands of postcards to Vietnam wishing him good health.
One of these perseverant campaigns is the one waged by Group 65 of Amnesty International in Toronto, Canada, which has campaigned for Patriarch Thich Huyen Quang for more than 17 years. The following interview is with Group 65’s Coordinator, Mr. Stan Jolly, who explains how his group conducted their campaign.
Y Lan (Penelope Faulkner): Mr. Stan Jolly, you are Co-ordinator of Amnesty International Group 65 on Prisoners of Conscience based in Toronto, Canada. Your group adopted Venerable Thich Huyen Quang as a prisoner of Conscience. Can you say why Group 65 chose him in particular ?
Stan Jolly: Actually, we didn’t choose him ourselves. Back in the 1990s, our Group asked Amnesty International to choose a prisoner of conscience so that we could campaign for his release. The London Headquarters responded that the Venerable Thich Huyen Quang was a very important prisoner of conscience in view of the fact that he is the Supreme Patriarch of the Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam. So the Group very readily accepted him as “their” prisoner of conscience. Since then – since the early 1990s – members of the group have been campaigning for his release.
One of the reasons I felt very involved was that my wife and I spent visited Vietnam in 1994. The hospitality and the friendliness of the Vietnamese people really touched us. We felt that this was a way we could help to pay back some of the kindness and hospitality that the Vietnamese people had extended to us in 1994.
We were “assigned” the Venerable Thich Huyen Quang as a prisoner of conscience, and we have no regrets. In fact, it has grown from there, and, we have come to understand that our campaign is not just about the Venerable Thich Huyen Quang. Its ultimately about the struggle to promote and defend internationally-recognised human rights, the right to freely say what you think, to live wherever you choose and practise the religion in which you believe. Our campaign on behalf of Venerable Thich Huyen Quang is in fact a struggle on behalf of all the 80 million citizens of Vietnam, whether that person be a humble rice farmer, a university student, an ethnic montagnard or someone as important and respected as the Supreme Patriarch of the UBCV.
Y Lan: If you had to describe Ven. Thich Huyen Quang in just a few words, what would you say ?
Stan Jolly: We have become increasingly proud to have him as our prisoner of conscience because he has never wavered from his commitment to religious freedom, his determination to work for religious freedom in completely nonviolent ways, and to speak out on behalf of religious freedom, not only for his own Church, but for all people in Vietnam, In spite of his own illnesses, of being isolated and ostracised in a very remote Pagoda, in spite of his old age. Even in failing health, he never slows down ! In one letter to the Vietnamese government, I quoted from the comment he made to the Police after they refused to let him go to go to Saigon for a medical check-up. Despite the surveillance posts outside his Monastery in Binh Dinh province, the Security Police monitoring his visitors, he publicly told them: “You prohibit people without any written justification or charge. In the civilized world, such verbal orders are totally unacceptable and unlawful”. I just hope when I get to be in my 80s, I will be as committed and feisty as the Venerable Thich Huyen Quang ! We are very proud to be able to continue to work on his behalf.
Y Lan : Could you tell me about the campaign launched by Amnesty International Group 65 ?
Stan Jolly: We have been campaigning for over 17 years. Over the last 5 years alone, we have sent over 3,500 letters, postcards and petitions to different Vietnamese officials. Some of our Petitions had 60 signatures, some over 300. We printed and collected signatures on 1,000 postcards sent to the previous Prime Minister of Vietnam, and every month – every month since the early 1990s – our group meets, and our members write new letters to the Vietnamese government. Each letter is similar, in that they always call for immediate and unconditional release of Venerable Thich Huyen Quang. Yet each letter is different, focusing on a different, specific “human right” that is being violated in his case, and taking up any recent developments. This is where the Quê Me website is so helpful to us, because it keep us up to date on what is happening. Thanks to this timely, factual information, we can complain or react swiftly, and that is very important.
Y Lan: I believe the Amnesty Group 65 also sent letters to the Canadian government on behalf of Thich Huyen Quang. What kind or reaction did you get from them ?
Stan Jolly: Yes, concurrently with our work to send letters and petitions to a wide range of Vietnamese government officials, we have consistently sent letters to the Canadian Prime Minister, Foreign Minister, Minister for International Cooperation, MPs and others. We also send copies of these letters to members of the Opposition Party, who challenge Government Ministers directly in the House of Commons. At the end of 2005, I send a package of over 3,000 letters and petitions to the Canadian Ambassador in Hanoi. I continued this strategy in 2006-7, so the Ambassador is fully aware of all the new developments. When Thich Huyen Quang was refused follow-up health treatment, we immediately alerted the Canadian Ambassador. He wrote back to say he had urgently raised the issue with the Vietnamese Foreign Minister and other officials.
We have received regular replies from the Canadian Foreign Minister, who assures us that Thich Huyen Quang’s case and human rights issues are raised at every possible opportunity. Indeed, at the APEC Summit in 2006, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper with met privately with PM Nguyen Tan Dung. He raised 8-10 names of religious and political dissidents – we believe Thich Huyen Quang and Thich Quangd Do were on that list – and strongly stressed that “economic reforms must go together with political reforms” in Vietnam.
We use the facts reported on Quê Me’s website to press our Canadian officials very hard. For example, in our letter to the Canadian Ambassador calling for action on Thich Huyen Quang’s prohibition to travel to Saigon, we cited Vietnam Foreign ministry spokesman Le Dung who completely denied the incident. We reminded the Canadian Ambassador that Le Dung was the very man who said, after Thich Quang Do was arrested, detained and harassed at the Saigon train station and prohibited to visit Thich Huyen Quang in Binh Dinh: “Thich Quang Do was never arrested at all, he is practicing his religion normally at the Thanh Minh Zen Monastery”. We also cited the remark made by Thich Quang Do in October 2005: “Freedom in Vietnam is like a painting of a cake. It looks wonderful on paper, but you can’t eat it !”
Y Lan: What kind of reaction have you had from the Vietnamese government over all the years your Group has been campaigning for the release of Patriarch Thich Huyen Quang ?
Stan Jolly: Absolutely none. We have never received a single response to the thousands of letters or petitions, from a single Vietnam official. In the past 17 years, we have not received one single response from the Vietnamese Ambassador in Ottawa, from the previous or current Presidents and Prime Ministers of Vietnam, the Minister of Public Security, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Minister of Health, who we wrote to recently, nor from the 22 Members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Vietnam. There has been absolutely no acknowledgement of our efforts. Frankly, I think in the future we shall put more pressure on our Minister for International Cooperation because the Canadian International Development Agency is funding a number of very important and very good projects that are helping people at the grass-roots level in Vietnam. One of the projects funded by Canada is legal reform. We have been sending some of our top lawyers and judges to help Vietnamese lawyers and members of the judiciary to learn more about international law, and how international human rights should play a part in their work. But if we Canadians can’t even get a polite acknowledgement, a simple gesture of courtesy, to any of our thousands of letters, why is Canada continuing to fund these projects for law reform ? What kind of law reform is it, when the law is used to ban the Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam ? This is in direct contradiction to the UN Charter on Human Rights and the UN Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. In countries that have signed on to these documents – and Vietnam has signed – people have a right to practice the religion of their choice.
Y Lan: The Vietnamese government claims that Thich Huyen Quang, Thich Quang Do and the UBCV are being “political”. What do you think about that ?
Stan Jolly: I remember the remark made by Thich Huyen Quang to the US Ambassador [Raymond Burghardt] who made the long, long trip to visit the Supreme Patriarch Thich Huyen Quang in the place where he was being detained. In the transcript of their conversation, made public by the US Ambassador, Thich Huyen Quang said: “We believe that the State should stay out of religion. We will stay out of politics if the politicians will stay out of religion”. I thought that was put very well. It’s a principle of international human rights law that the State does not have any role to play in authorizing or not authorizing, in legalizing or not legalizing, any church, whether it be the Roman Catholic, the Pentecostal or the Buddhist. I know there have been complaints that the Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam, Thich Huyen Quang and Thich Quang Do are engaging in politics. But in our view, they are only engaging in politics because their right to freedom to practice their religion, freedom to associate with whoever they wish, freedom of expression is being denied. If those rights were not being denied, they would not be playing any role in politics.
So, I think that in the future we will be tightening the screws on the Canadian government. Not to hurt good projects that help Vietnamese people, but rather to put pressure on the Vietnamese government, and tell them that if Canada is to continue trading with Vietnam and giving millions of dollars for legal reform projects, then Vietnam has an obligation to bring its laws into line with international standards. I know that this takes time, but I think the Canadian government has the right to say: “Our patience is running out”. Also, as Canadian taxpayers, we will be asking more and more questions about why our tax dollars are being used to repress organisations like the Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam through laws and ordinances, Police surveillance and house arrest for many decades, simply for practising their beliefs.
Y Lan: Thank you Mr. Stan Jolly.
