Vietnam Free Expression Newsletter No. 19/2018 – Week of May 7-13

Several relatives of jailed members of the Brotherhood for Democracy were prohibited this week from meeting with foreign diplomats. Nguyen Van Dai and Pham Van Troi’s wives were effectively placed under house arrest ahead of the meeting, and several other relatives of political prisoners were blocked from attending the meeting while in transit. A few relatives were able to meet with the diplomats and updated them on the prisoners. The meeting comes just days before the bilateral US-Vietnam human rights dialogue, slated to start on May 15.A group of Catholics in Nghe An province has submitted a petition to the government to take action against local officials who allegedly allowed pro-government thugs to beat them during a land dispute in December 2017 and then tried to cover up the event. The locals were beaten after attempting to dig a ditch on land claimed both by their church and the local government. They claim that police did not intervene upon witnessing the assault. The petitioners believe that the local government is now trying to hide what happened by blaming the parishioners themselves for the incident; four parishioners were summoned for questioning last week in what they say is an attempt to get them to drop their petition and also relinquish the contested land.

Environmentalism and authoritarian politics in Vietnam: “Hence, for the majority of young Vietnamese, the Formosa crisis was much more than an environmental movement. While advocating for the environment, they became overtly critical of the everyday administrative, legal and political structures they are embedded in. In the words of a 27-year-old activist: ‘After I got involved in environmental activism, I came to the realisation that it’s not just about some thermal power plant we try to stop. How can we stop the sixty something coal-fired thermal power plants that will be built by 2030? This is an issue with the government. We need to fix the government instead of fighting from one thermal power plant to another.’ Ordinary people who did not belong to any formalised civil society organisation and initially did not want to get involved into politics suddenly realised that if they care about the environment, they also have to care about political change and transformation. Slowly, this political awareness is being embraced by a few NGOs – despite the tight grip of the government. Vietnamese civil society, whether informal or formal, started to realise that their work, and environmental work in particular, could not be detached from human rights, fair and open elections, peaceful assembly, access to information as well as freedom of association and speech.”The women who risk their lives for others’ rights: “Despite the unrelenting scrutiny of the authorities, Huynh Thuc Vy refuses to stay silent. ‘Even though the imprisonment of my father and the repeated harassment towards our whole family has made us so tired, we have the chance to have meaningful and altruistic lives, by taking risks, acting on behalf of vulnerable people and facing the authorities,’ she told the BBC recently. ‘If we do not play a role in activism now, we will never be able to demand gender equality later.'”