VIETNAM: Vietnam jails dissident priest for eight years

Vietnam on Friday (March 30) sentenced a Catholic priest to eight years in jail after a court found him guilty of anti-government activity. The People's Court judge in the central province of Thua Thien-Hue read the verdict after a half-day trial during which the priest, Father Thadeus Nguyen Van Ly, 60, was taken out of the court three times for shouting in protest. Ly was put in another room while the judge delivered the verdict and also imposed a five-year surveillance order, which in Vietnam usually means house arrest after time served in prison. The government also tried four people it said were accomplices of Ly. Two men were sentenced to five and six years prison and two women were handed suspended sentences of two years and four years. Journalists and diplomats were allowed to monitor proceedings of the trial via closed-circuit TV from another room except for the opening five minutes and five minutes during the verdict announcement when they were allowed in the same room with the defendants. Earlier Ly was seen taken into the court by two policemen to face the hearing more than a month after he was detained at his Hue home and accused of plotting to establish a party called "Dang Thang Tien Vietnam" (Vietnam Progression Party). Ly, who has spent more than a decade in prison since the early 1980s, was last freed from prison two years ago. He had been convicted of undermining national unity in 2001 and sentenced to 15 years in jail plus five years of house arrest. Ly, who appeared wearing a purple shirt, was described by overseas supporters as one of the founders one year ago of "Bloc 8406", which some diplomats say comes closest to being a movement opposed to one-party rule. The Communist Party of Vietnam is the only legal political party in the country of 84 million people, who have an average annual per capita income of about $720, although economic market reforms are improving the standard of living for many. The United States, the European Union and several other countries have told Hanoi they were concerned about the arrest of Ly on Feb. 24 and two dissident lawyers in Hanoi on March 6. U.S.-based Human Rights Watch and other groups described those arrests and the detention of members of an outlawed trade union in January as "a crackdown on dissent", an accusation the government rejects. Vietnam has the second largest number of Catholics in Asia after the Philippines, but they still make up less than 10 percent of the population. The investigation of Ly was announced a month after Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung became the highest-ranking official in the government to meet the Pope as Hanoi and the Vatican explore the possibility of establishing diplomatic relations. On a visit to Vietnam this month, Monsignor Pietro Parolin, undersecretary at the Vatican's Secretary of State, told reporters that his delegation asked Hanoi for information about the dissident priest, but Parolin declined further comment. The official Vietnam News Agency said in February that Ly had violated "on-site administrative surveillance", leaving his residence 14 times without permission from the authorities. The term "administrative surveillance" or "administrative detention" usually means house arrest under a decade-old decree used to hold people without trial. Hanoi has abolished that part of the decree, but diplomats said it was unclear whether it applied to political activists and leaders of an outlawed Buddhist group whose movements are restricted.

ITN Source | March 30, 2007