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(New York) – The Vietnamese government should immediately release the Rev. Nguyen Hong Quang, a human rights defender and activist leader of the banned Mennonite church in Vietnam, Human Rights Watch said today. Quang was arrested on Tuesday after publicly criticizing Vietnam’s government for detaining four Vietnamese Mennonites.

Quang, who is trained as a lawyer, has defended land rights cases of impoverished farmers from the provinces, spoken out against the arrests of religious and political dissidents, and publicized the plight of minority Christian churches in Vietnam’s Central Highlands. Many of his critical writings have been disseminated on the Internet in both Vietnamese and English.

“Quang’s arrest appears to be part of the Vietnamese government’s mounting repression of activists who promote human rights or religious freedom,” said Dinah PoKempner, general counsel at Human Rights Watch.

The religious leader’s arrest took place in the midst of a massive crackdown against Montagnard Protestants in the Central Highlands. The Vietnamese government bans independent religious associations and only permits religious activities by officially recognized churches and organizations.

Quang was arrested at 3 p.m. on June 8 on the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City by 30 police officers and taken to the jail at the District 2 Public Security Police Station. The police cordoned off and searched Quang’s home, which serves as a Mennonite church as well as his legal office. They ransacked the office and confiscated his computer, personal papers and numerous documents, including his legal files on human rights cases he is defending. He has reportedly been charged with “instigating people to obstruct officials from carrying out their duties.”

The charges against the Mennonite clergyman apparently refer to an altercation in March between Quang and members of his church with police officers who had been harassing and monitoring Mennonite church members, including the head of the Mennonite church in Kontum province in the Central Highlands.

On March 2, dozens of church members gathered at Quang’s church after a dispute broke out between police and several Mennonites, who had photographed the motorbike of one of the plainclothes police officers posted outside the church. More than 100 paramilitary police officers from Unit 113 of the Ministry of Public Security were dispatched to the scene, where they scuffled with the crowd of church members. Police arrested four church members: church elder Nguyen Hieu Nghia, and evangelists Nguyen Thanh Nhan, Pham Ngoc Thach and Nguyen van Phuong, all of whom were severely beaten.

Since the March incident, Quang and his colleagues have mounted a campaign to call attention to the arrests and possible torture of the four Mennonites, who have been detained for more than two months without official orders being issued for their imprisonment or the prosecution of their cases.

On May 18, Quang released an eight-page report on the March arrests that included a section entitled “Violations of the Law by Public Security Officers of District 2 and Ho Chi Minh City in the Forcible Detention of the Four Mennonite Evangelists.” Quang argued that the police officers had violated numerous articles of Vietnam’s penal code in carrying out the arrests.

“People should not be arrested for criticizing injustice or asking government officials to abide by their own laws,” said PoKempner. “Once again, Vietnam’s government has shown it will go to any length to silence those who dare to speak out about religious repression, arbitrary confiscation of land, and the rights of ethnic minorities.”

Background

Quang, 45, is general secretary of the Mennonite Church in Vietnam, which is not officially approved by the Vietnamese government. He studied international law at the Faculty of Law of the National University in Ho Chi Minh City from 1995 to 1999. Despite his legal training, he has been prevented from officially practicing as a lawyer because it is necessary to be a member of the Communist Party of Vietnam in order to obtain a license. However he has used this training to help ethnic minorities and low-income people claim redress for violations of their rights, particularly illegal confiscation of their land.

In December, Quang and 30 other church leaders held a sit-in at a police station in Ho Chi Minh City to protest the arrests of 19 Christians who were detained for distributing religious pamphlets during the Southeast Asia Games in Ho Chi Minh City.

In September, Quang issued a strongly worded essay via the Internet that criticized the trial and convictions of several relatives of one of Vietnam’s most prominent political prisoners, Father Nguyen Van Ly. Father Ly, a Roman Catholic, was sentenced to 15 years in prison in 2001 for “undermining the policy of national unity” after he submitted written testimony to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.

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