Vietnam’s president to visit DC as dissident lawyer’s trial postponed

Democracy Digest
11 July 2013

“President Barack Obama has invited his Vietnamese counterpart to visit the United States this month, looking to boost cooperation on security and trade despite concerns over the communist state’s rights record,” Agence France Presse reports.

Earlier this week, Vietnam’s authorities indefinitely postponed the trial of dissident lawyer and blogger Le Quoc Quan.

The trial’s postponement and Sang’s upcoming visit could be connected, said defense analyst and professor Carl Thayer from the University of New South Wales in Australia.

“It would seem postponing the trial at the moment with Sang’s visit could be related, I’m guessing it is,” Thayer told VOA. “Then the Vietnamese have the opportunity afterwards to decide what action to take.”

Twelve members of the US House of Representatives signed a letter to Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung last month calling for Mr. Le’s release and warning that Hanoi’s “continuing agenda to crack down on its citizens’ basic freedoms will dampen diplomatic relations between our countries,” the Wall Street Journal reports:

That’s a potent threat since Hanoi is eager to cultivate better ties with the U.S. as a counterbalance to China’s growing assertiveness in the region. The regime has in the past responded to U.S. criticism with the early release of some dissidents and other putative improvements in human rights, and we hope it will do the same for Mr. Le. But that will merely be a gesture to fend off diplomatic embarrassment unless the Communist Party respects the growing desire among Vietnamese citizens for a greater say in their government.

In a recent open letter, several human rights and civil society groups called on the Obama administration to demand the release of the qualified lawyer and active blogger, who was arbitrarily detained , for “having exercised his right to freedom of expression, his right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association, as well as his activities as a human rights defender.”

On his popular blog, Quan exposes human rights abuses commonly ignored by Vietnamese state media, says the letter, which is signed by Article 19, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), English PEN, Freedom House, Frontline Defenders, Lawyers for Lawyers (L4L), Lawyers’ Rights Watch Canada, Media Defence South East Asia, Media Legal Defense Initiative (MLDI), the National Endowment for Democracy, Reporters Without Borders, and the World Movement for Democracy.

Le Quoc Quan was arrested in March 2007, four days after returning to Vietnam following completion of a Reagan-Fascell fellowship at the the National Endowment for Democracy, for alleged subversion.

Source: Democracy Digest

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