Donnerstag, 1. Mai 2014

Reporter without Borders


For the first time ever, Reporters Without Borders is publishing a list of profiles of “100 information heroes” for World Press Freedom Day (3 May).

Among them there are three vietnameses

LE NGOC THANH

Vietnam / Asia-Pacific

Anton le Ngoc Thanh is a journalist and a Catholic priest. His work for Vietnam Redemporist News, a Catholic news organization for which he has worked since the 1990s, has caused him numerous problems with the Vietnamese authorities. 

In 2012 he was stopped for questioning on his way to Bac Lieu in the south of the country, where a woman had set fire to herself in protest against her daughter, the blogger Ta Phong Tan, being put on trial. 

He was held for several hours for causing a traffic accident while travelling on foot. He was arrested again last year during a demonstration in support of the blogger and activist Dinh Nhat Uy, convicted for organizing a campaign for the release of his jailed younger brother. Thanh is under constant police surveillance and is frequently prevented from covering and publicizing the human rights abuses that he has witnessed.

PHAM CHI DUNG

Vietnam / Asia-Pacific

Like others who have seen nomenklatura corruption up close, Pham Chi Dung returned his party card. Instead he devoted himself to writing and developing a critique of Vietnam’s political class, which he knows inside out. He was a military officer for many years and was an aide to Truong Tan Sang in Ho Chin Minh City before Sang became president in 2011. 

He has written about public security and the dominant cultural, economic and religious ideology. He was arrested on charges of “conspiring to overthrow the government” and “anti-government propaganda” in July 2012 in connection with articles about corruption and the government’s shortcomings, but the investigation was abandoned and he was released seven months later. 

His PhD in economics, his 11 books and his many interviews for the BBC, RFI and Radio Free Asia still do not protect him. His passport was confiscated as he was about to board a flight to Geneva in February 2014 to attend a conference on rights and freedoms in Vietnam.

TRUONG DUY NHAT

Vietnam / Asia-Pacific

After starting out as a reporter for regional police publications, Truong Duy Nhat worked for the daily Dai Doan Ket (Great Solidarity). But he resigned as a state media journalist in 2010 to become a prolific and outspoken blogger, calling his blog – originally truongduynhat.vn and then, a year later, truongduynhat.org – “Another point of view.” 

He posted more than 1,000 articles, most of them his own, in the space of three years. After four orders to close his blogs, he was finally arrested in May 2013 and sentenced to two years in prison in connection with 12 of his most vitriolic articles. 

Seven months before his arrest, he wrote: ““I am neither a criminal nor a reactionary. The handcuff and gun should not be used against bloggers who sacrifice their interests to keep outspoken blogs that are helping to change the party and the people.”



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