Free-speech group calls on Vietnam to release cyber-dissident

Deutsche Presse Agentur
Published: Wednesday August 23, 2006

Hanoi- An international free-speech group urged Vietnam on Wednesday to release a 25-year-old dissident arrested at an internet cafe last week. Truong Quoc Huy was seized by plainclothes police at a Ho Chi Minh City internet cafe on August 18 as he chatted online with friends, his brother and mother said.

The arrest, the latest in a series of crackdowns on critics of Vietnam's one-party rule, came five weeks after his release from nine months in jail without trial.

According to the Paris-based Reporters Sans Frontieres (Reporters Without Borders), Huy is being targeted for his criticism of Vietnam's communist government on the internet voice-chat forum PalTalk.

"We regard this as an abduction since the security services have behaved in an utterly illegal manner," the group said in a statement received Wednesday.

"Truong was already held for months without being tried and without even being able to see a lawyer," the group said. "It is high time the government told its political police to put an end to such arbitrary methods."

Vietnam has not acknowledged Huy's arrest, and a government spokesman did not respond to requests this week for comment.

Huy; his brother Truong Quoc Tuan, 28; and Tuan's fiancee, Lisa Pham, were originally arrested in October in a raid on their mother's home on Kiem Street in Ho Chi Minh City.

The brothers said they were accused of plotting to overthrow Vietnam's one-party government although they said they were calling only for democratic elections and for the Communist Party to weed out corruption.

They were released in early July, and Pham soon after left for the United States, where she is a legal resident.

Soon after his release, Huy declared that he had joined the 8406 Group, a pro-democracy movement that takes its name from a petition for elections and reform signed on April 8 by more than 100 activists.

© 2006 DPA - Deutsche Presse-Agenteur