As of September 24th this
week, the Vietnamese government has jailed three dissident bloggers
who write posts in criticism of the government. They were accused of
posting on abanned website called Free Journalist's Club as well as
being accused of writing critical posts on their own personal blogs.
Nguyan Van Hai (pen name Dieu Cay) is a former soldier who was given
the longest sentence at 12 years of imprisonment. Ta Phong Tan is a
former policewoman whose mother set herself on fire in front of a
government office in July and who was sentenced with ten years.
Finally, Phan Thahn Hai was sentenced with four years in prison.
There were some suspicious situations around the trial, including the
judge not allowing the defence to finish his statement due to a time
limit, and police detaining Dieu Cay's son and former wife so they
could not attend the proceedings. In addition, as Dieu Cay's ex-wife
pointed out, “Three people were charged with especially dangerous
crimes within only several hours and people can clearly see that
these are the most absurd sentences given to political prisoners. In
addition, Vietnamese laws give citizens freedom of speech, which is
ratified in the international treaties to which Vietnam is a part.
The U.S. Embassy in Vietnam as well as the Human Rights Watch and
various other activists and organizations have pointed out the
dubious legality of these sentences and called into question the
appropriateness of the harsh punishments.
Dieu Cay stated “According to
Vietnamese laws, citizens have the right to freedom of speech”, a
fact which the government seems to be overlooking. Earlier in the
month, the Vietnamese Prime Minister stuck out at three other blogs
critical of the government, and it seems that the Vietnamese
government's prerogative is eliminating all criticism of itself,
which goes directly in opposition with the freedom of speech laws of
the country and in the international treaties that Vietnam is a part
of. However, the government is using “vaguely-worded” national
security laws in order to enact these crackdowns, so navigating the
legality of the situation is a complicated issue, since while what
the government is doing seems illegal on some levels, they may be
protected under the national security laws they are invoking. They
are already receiving heavy international criticism, so freeing the
prisoners may be an outside effort. If lawyers within the country
cannot utilize free speech laws to free the bloggers, it may come
down to the other countries involved in the international treaties to
threaten dissolution of the treaties if the bloggers are not let go.
However, it is not certain that this will happen, since maintaining
the treaties may be more important to other countries than the
prisoners' individual rights.
No comments:
Post a Comment