In a 14 April 2000 letter to the general secretary of the Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP), Le Kha Phieu, RSF protested against the arrest and expulsion of Sylvaine Pasquier, a journalist working for the French weekly “L’Express”. She was forced to leave the country. According to Robert Ménard, the organisation’s secretary-general, “this arrest shows that […]
In a 14 April 2000 letter to the general secretary of the Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP), Le Kha Phieu, RSF protested against the arrest and expulsion of Sylvaine Pasquier, a journalist working for the French weekly “L’Express”. She was forced to leave the country. According to Robert Ménard, the organisation’s secretary-general, “this arrest shows that it is impossible for a foreign journalist to work freely in Vietnam.” Reminding the VCP general secretary that the journalist was only exercising her right to inform, guaranteed by Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which has been ratified by Vietnam, RSF called for “an end to the control of foreign journalists and the liberalisation of press laws in the country”.
According to the information collected by RSF, Pasquier, a reporter with “L’Express”, was arrested on 13 April by police in Ho Chi Minh City, in the south of the country. She had gone to Vietnam to cover the celebrations of the anniversary of the fall of Saigon, and had also tried to meet Vietnamese dissidents. Pasquier was working without a press visa in an attempt to escape police and administrative controls.
