![\"AFP](\"..\/images\/AFP.gif\")
<\/a> Agence France Presse<\/span><\/p>\n\n
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GENEVA, April 2 (AFP) – The UN refugee agency said Friday it was holding talks with Vietnamese authorities about a jailed Buddhist dissident and was hopeful that it could secure his resettlement.<\/p>\n
Pham Van Tuong, 50, who has refugee status, reportedly disappeared in Cambodia until last year, when authorities in Hanoi said he was arrested at the Vietnamese-Cambodian border.<\/p>\n
\u00abUNHCR is in touch with Vietnamese authorities on this case and we are discussing with them a humanitarian solution,\u00bb said Ron Redmond, a spokesman for the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.<\/p>\n
\u00abWe are hopeful we\u2019ll be able to solve this,\u00bb he told AFP, declining to give further details.<\/p>\n
The former monk, also known as Thich Tri Luc, was sentenced to 20 months in prison on March 12 for undermining internal security following a trial in Ho Chi Minh City which reportedly lasted less than an hour.<\/p>\n
Washington had urged the Vietnamese government to grant UN refugee officials access to Tuong, and US officials were able to speak with him earlier this week.<\/p>\n
Redmond indicated that the UN hoped to be able to resettle Tuong outside Vietnam.<\/p>\n
Human rights groups said Tuong, who had fled Vietnam in 2002, had revealed during telephone contact with them on March 26 that he had been arrested in Cambodia and forcibly repatriated to Vietnam.<\/p>\n
\u00abVietnamese authorities hid him for a year… and ended up \u2018legalising\u2019 his 20 month arbitrary detention,\u00bb Vo Van Ai, head of the Paris-based Vietnam Committee on Human Rights told the UN\u2019s top human rights assembly here.<\/p>\n
Van Ai condemned \u00abrepression\u00bb on freedom of expression in Vietnam and the crackdown on the Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam, urging Hanoi to release 11 other detained Buddhist leaders.<\/p>\n
Tuong is a member of the church, which was outlawed in 1981 after it refused to come under the control of the ruling Communist Party. <\/p>\n
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Agence France Presse GENEVA, April 2 (AFP) – The UN refugee agency said Friday it was holding talks with Vietnamese authorities about a jailed Buddhist dissident and was hopeful that it could secure his resettlement. Pham Van Tuong, 50, who has refugee status, reportedly disappeared in Cambodia until last year, when authorities in …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":375,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","","category-press-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/queme.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/queme.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/queme.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/queme.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/375"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/queme.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/queme.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/queme.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/queme.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/queme.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}