Nguyen Duc Hung

March 2024:

It has been 18 months since Nguyen Duc Hung was put in solitary confinement at Nam Ha Prison, his brother Nguyen Duc Ho told Project88 on March 15. Since that time, Hung’s father has only been allowed to see him once, in December of last year. In August, when Nguyen Duc Sen tried to bring his son some supplies, he was told that Hung could not receive them because he was still in solitary confinement for violating prison rules. Prison officials said it was because Hung tried to buy food from fellow inmate Le Dinh Luong, who’s serving a 20-year sentence. After the December visit, the family learned that Hung was not permitted to wear his wire-rimmed eyeglasses nor have 10-minute phone calls per month as allowed by law.  Hung has reportedly asked his family to hire two lawyers for him.

January 2024:

Project88 has learned more about the case of an activist arrested two years ago. According to Nguyen Duc Hung’s brother, Nguyen Duc Ho, Hung was kidnapped by police while traveling from Ha Tinh province to Binh Thuan province on Jan. 1, 2022. It wasn’t until one month later that the family received an official notice that Hung had been detained. He was tried in July 2022 without a lawyer. The family was not notified of the trial and only learned about it afterwards from state media. Since Hung’s arrest, his family has been allowed to visit him only once, in February 2023.

Former political prisoner Nguyen Viet Dung, who saw Hung a few times while they were at Nam Ha Prison together, told Project88 that Hung is a very strong-willed individual who was allegedly often put in solitary confinement for very trivial reasons simply because prison guards wanted to break him. An active human rights defender and outspoken critic of the government, Hung was sentenced in July 2022 to five and a half years in prison for spreading “anti-state propaganda.”