Continued attack against Vietnamese Homo Homini award laureate
Published: Mar 21, 2019 Reading time: 2 minutes
Vietnamese independent journalist Pham Doan Trang, the 2017 Homo Homini Award laureate is under strict surveillance by the Vietnamese authorities, and at a significant risk of being arrested for excercising her constitutional and fundamental human rights. This is the most recent attack against Pham Doan Trang, one of the leading figures of the contemporary Vietnamese dissent.
According to her personal Facebook posting, heightened surveillance on her mother’s house in Hanoi started around the Lunar New Year celebration in February 2019, allegedly to entrap her for an arrest. Because she did not go to Hanoi, security forces adopted other methods such as pretending to be her reader to entrap her, as well as multiple attempts to hack into her personal Facebook account.
According to the same source, on March 18, her temporary residence in Ho Chi Minh was uncovered by security forces. It, together with all Trang’s personal belongings, is currently inaccessible. Security forces are allegedly tracing out the production and publication of her new book titled “Learning Public Policy through the Special Economic Zones Draft Bill.” The book, published in December 2018, uses the Draft Bill – a subject of great public outrage and opposition in 2018 for allegedly primarily benefiting China, as a case study for educational purposes.
Trang is now under serious threats of being arrested and physically assaulted. As written in her post:
“If you hear, in the coming days, that I am involved in a traffic accident or suddenly got attacked somewhere, then it must be the planning and actions of the secret police. There would not be any ‘citizen actions’ that could have caused it.”
This is the most recent attack against Pham Doan Trang. In Feburary 2018, she was forcefully dragged out of her house in Hanoi by security forces for her book “Politics for the Masses.” In August 2018, she was arbitrarily arrested during a small concert in Ho Chi Minh, then interrogated and beaten by the police.
In recognition of the courage she employs while tirelessly pursuing a democratic change within her country, despite harassment and persecution, People in Need awarded Trang with the Homo Homini Award in March 2018. She did not go to Prague, the Czech Republic to receive the award in person, as she wrote on her Facebook: “I will never leave Vietnam until it changes.”
