Vietnamese Facebook User Freed After Five Days of Questioning by Police
RFA | 2021-04-15
Police in southern Vietnam’s Binh Thuan province have freed a Facebook user
after holding him for five days of questioning over social media posts opposing
authorities, the blogger said on Wednesday.
Nguyen Van Son Trung was detained April 9 following the arrest of ethnic Cham
poet Dong Chuong Tu, who was released on April 10 after being held and
questioned for three days.
A third friend, Tran Duc Tin, was arrested on April 10 but was also freed after
several days of questioning.
All three had discussed on Facebook the procedure for nominating independent
candidates for election to Vietnam’s National Assembly and local People’s
Councils, a political process tightly controlled by the country’s ruling
Communist Party, which carefully vets named candidates for Party approval.
Trung was handcuffed by police on his arrest and was questioned for five days
before his release, Trung told RFA’s Vietnamese Service.
“During those five days, they asked me to verify the posts I had put up on my
Facebook account,” Trung said.
“They also wanted me to explain the discussions my friends and I had held on our
group chat, including how to self-nominate candidates for People’s Councils at
different levels,” he said, adding that they had understood that citizens age 21
and older could self-nominate as council members.
Trung said that police also questioned him about other Facebook groups and
whether he was connected to the U.S.-based Viet Tan opposition party, a group
designated by Vietnamese authorities as a terrorist organization, or Vietnamese
rights lawyer Nguyen Van Dai, now living in exile in Germany.
Physically attacked
A police officer slapped Trung on his head on his arrival at the police station,
and another slapped him three times on his ears during questioning, Trung said,
adding that his interrogators came from three separate security departments and
refused his request to see a lawyer.
Speaking to RFA, Trung said that the five days of questioning had left him
anxious and scared, and that he had been asked at the end to sign a document
written by his interrogators testifying that he had worked with them voluntarily
and had not been physically or mentally harmed.
“I also had to promise to ‘work with them’ again if they asked me to, and I had
to promise to write my stories in future in an ‘honest and objective manner,’”
Trung said.
“Those five days were so stressful that I decided just to sign all those papers
so that I could return home,” he said.
Trung’s five days of detention violated Vietnamese law, which stipulates that
police cannot temporarily detain anyone without a temporary detention warrant
unless they provide in writing a specific reason to the person in detention and
their family.
Temporary detention should also not last more than 12 hours unless “absolutely
necessary” and must not last longer than 24 hours, Vietnamese law says.
During the past three months, police have arrested two other self-nominated
assembly candidates, Tran Quoc Khanh and Le Trong Hung, both from Hanoi, for
“disseminating anti-State materials,” even though the central government has
openly discussed an initiative to “open doors wider for self-nominated
candidates.”
Reported by RFA’s Vietnamese Service. Translated by Chau Vu. Written in English
by Richard Finney.
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