<\/p>\n
\nVOICE delegation at the UN office in Geneva. From left to right: Anna Nguyen, Le Thi Minh Ha, and Dinh Thao. Source: VietnamUPR Facebook page<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
October 9, 2017<\/em>:\u00a0When the human rights group, Vietnamese Overseas Initiative for Conscience Empowerment (VOICE), sent a delegation to the United Nations Human Rights Council in 2014, the delegation was made up of three men and all were citizens of Vietnam. This year, the trio is all female.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe did not purposely want to have a female delegation,\u201d said Anna Nguyen, Director of Programs at VOICE. A more interesting point, she explained, are the different backgrounds \u2014 and continents \u2014 the three women come from. Anna is a lawyer born and raised in Australia. Joining her is Le Thi Minh Ha, the wife of blogger\u00a0Nguyen Huu Vinh who was sentenced in March 2016 to five years in prison<\/a>\u00a0by the Vietnamese government for founding and operating a successful independent news blog. The third member is Dinh Thao, a Vietnamese citizen who left her career as a medical doctor to become an activist working out of VOICE\u2019s headquarters in the Philippines and is now stationed in Belgium as the European Union Program Coordinator.<\/p>\n
As activists waging a long war against Vietnam\u2019s authoritarian government, they are unbothered by the comments littered on the\u00a0VOICE Facebook page<\/a>\u00a0calling them \u201cdogs\u201d and \u201cliars\u201d who should \u201cdie.\u201d The group suspects the comments come from hacks paid by the Vietnamese government. In the spirit of free expression though, the malicious comments are free to stay. It\u2019s the opposite of what Hanoi is doing.<\/p>\n
In 2017 alone, Vietnam\u2019s one-party Communist government has detained or sentenced 16 activists under the country\u2019s draconian penal code, and specifically\u00a0Article 88, which makes it a crime to \u201cpropagate\u201d against the government.\u00a0Human Rights Watch has reported<\/a>\u00a0on the country\u2019s long history limiting freedom of expression, which has sent more than 100 activists to prisons. The country\u2019s repression has led to thousands of refugees seeking political freedoms and economic opportunities to live and work elsewhere under more democratic and transparent governance.<\/p>\n
VOICE was founded in 1997 as a legal aid office in the Philippines to help stateless Vietnamese refugees resettle in countries, including Australia, the U.S. and Canada. Since then, the nonprofit\u2019s mission has branched out to include advocacy for human rights and the rule of law in Vietnam.<\/p>\n
Anna\u2019s career has evolved somewhat similarly. She began her career as a refugee lawyer in Australia where for three years she worked with asylum seekers from Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam. \u201cThat\u2019s when I started to learn about the human rights situation in Vietnam. Instead of helping people leave the country, I wanted to explore why people were leaving in the first place. The war ended in 1975 but why are people still leaving?\u201d<\/p>\n
Since joining VOICE in 2014, Anna\u2019s work includes communicating with foreign governments and multilateral organizations, and persuading them to use their influence to put pressure on Vietnam. She also makes sure these foreign bodies hear from independent activists and civil society groups in Vietnam. \u201cMany of these activists are banned from traveling and don\u2019t have a platform, so it\u2019s great that we can give them a voice,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
In 2014, a 23-member delegation from Hanoi met with the U.N. Human Rights Council for the\u00a0Universal Periodic Review<\/a>\u00a0(UPR), a review process on the human rights records of all UN Member States. The\u00a0Vietnamese government agreed<\/a>\u00a0to the implementation of some UPR recommendations and rejected others, notably the release of prisoners and the revision of vague national security laws that are used to suppress human rights.<\/p>\n
The goals of this year\u2019s\u00a0Mid-term UPR Advocacy Campaign<\/a>\u00a0are to follow up on the recommendations and to advocate for the prisoners, particularly\u00a0Tran Huynh Duy Thuc<\/a>, a technology entrepreneur and blogger who was sentenced to 16 years for \u201cconducting activities aimed at overthrowing the people\u2019s administration\u201d on January 2010;\u00a0Nguyen Ngoc Nhu Quynh<\/a>, better known by her pen name, Mother Mushroom, is a blogger convicted of \u201canti state propaganda\u201d on June 2017 and sentenced to ten years\u2019 imprisonment; and\u00a0Tran Thi Nga<\/a>, a blogger sentenced to nine years\u2019 imprisonment on July 2017 for \u201canti state propaganda\u201d in her sharing of articles and videos highlighting abuses tied to environmental crises and political corruption.\u00a0In the past couple of months, there has been a rise in the number of female activists targeted by the government. Mother Mushroom wrote that she was motivated to create a better future for her two children.<\/p>\n
The mid-term campaign, which runs from September 15 through October 10, has been in the planning stages since the last UPR. The delegation has organized a marathon of meetings with foreign bodies in Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, Belgium and the Czech Republic to\u00a0give suggestions on how these groups can exert pressure on Hanoi.<\/p>\n
In a recent case that has made headlines for its Cold War style of abductions, a\u00a0Vietnamese asylum seeker was snatched off the streets of Berlin in broad daylight on August 24<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 one day before his asylum hearing \u2014 and whisked back to Vietnam on corruption charges. In a meeting with Germany\u2019s Office of Foreign Affairs on September 15, VOICE raised concerns to Annette Knobloch, Deputy Head of Unit of South East Asia\/Pacific.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe made them a number of suggestions and then a few days after our meeting, it was announced in the news that Germany had\u00a0expelled another diplomat<\/a>,\u201d Anna said.<\/p>\n
As Vietnam\u2019s biggest trading partner in the EU, Germany has influential leverage through its purse strings. There\u2019s also\u00a0Germany\u2019s development aid to Vietnam<\/a>, which in 2015 was\u00a0$257 million distributed over two years.<\/a><\/p>\n
On top of the meetings with Germany and other foreign governments, the delegates have communicated with\u00a0UN Special Rapporteur on human rights defender, Michel Forst<\/a>, and\u00a0CIVICUS<\/a>, a group working to strengthen civil society. VOICE\u2019s collaboration with CIVICUS, which has consultative status with the UN, gave VOICE the opportunity to present in front of the UN Human Rights Council on September 19.<\/p>\n