MLDI and its partners call for Le Quoc Quan's immediate and unconditional release.
The Media Legal Defence Initiative, together with eleven other human rights organisations, has submitted requests for urgent action to three United Nations Special Rapporteurs and the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, calling for the immediate release of Vietnamese human rights lawyer and blogger Le Quoc Quan.
Le Quoc Quan has been held in solitary detention by the Vietnamese authorities since his arrest on 27 December on trumped up allegations of tax evasion. He has been allowed to see his lawyer only once and has been refused any contact with his family.
Le Quoc Quan has long been on the radar of the Vietnamese authorities for his human rights work. Before his arrest, he wrote about human rights abuses and other issues not covered by Vietnamese state media on his popular blog. He also defended human rights in court as a lawyer, until he was disbarred in 2007 on suspicion of engaging in “activities to overthrow the regime”.
Over the last few years, he has been arrested several times and repeatedly been harassed by State authorities. In August 2012, he was hospitalised after being beaten up near his house by unknown assailants. The assault was never fully investigated by the police.
Should he be found guilty, Le Quoc Quan faces up to three years imprisonment and a fine that would bankrupt him.
This is not the first time that the Vietnamese government has brought trumped up criminal charges so silence regime critics. In 2008, well-known blogger Dieu Cay was sentenced to thirty months in prison for tax evasion. Before he was even released, in 2012 he sentenced to an additional twelve years in proceedingsdescribed by the Economist as looking "very much like an old-fashioned Soviet-style show trial".
In the appeals to the Special Rapporteurs and the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, MLDI and its partners submit that the charges have solely been brought against Mr Quan to punish him for the lawful exercise of his rights under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the Universal Declaration on Human Rights (UDHR).
MLDI and its partners have demanded Le Quoc Quan's immediate and unconditional release.
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