(RSF/IFEX) – The following is an RSF press release: For immediate release Wednesday 10 May 2000 Pham Thai is free The Vietnamese journalist and dissident, 80, has left prison On 30 April 2000, after five years in detention – and six years before the end of his sentence – Vietnamese journalist and dissident Nguyen Ngoc […]
(RSF/IFEX) – The following is an RSF press release:
For immediate release
Wednesday 10 May 2000
Pham Thai is free
The Vietnamese journalist and dissident, 80, has left prison
On 30 April 2000, after five years in detention – and six years before the end of his sentence – Vietnamese journalist and dissident Nguyen Ngoc Tan, known under his pen name, Pham Thai, was released from the Ham Tan work camp (north-east of Ho Chi Minh City). The journalist, who is 80 years old, is gravely ill and was allegedly released on humanitarian grounds.
Reporters sans frontières welcomes this release, of course, but regrets that it did not come sooner. A journalist and activist with the human rights organisation Movement for the Unity of the People and Construction of Democracy, he was arrested in 1995 and sentenced to eleven years in prison for “conspiring against the socialist power”. Pham Thai fought for press freedom, non-existent in Vietnam, with Nguyen Dinh Huy, notably, who remains jailed. Reporters sans frontières asks that the Vietnamese authorities release this defender of press freedom, who is still being held at the Ham Tan camp and suffers from Parkinson’s disease. He is the last imprisoned journalist in the country.
Despite Reporters sans frontières’ repeated appeals, Pham Thai never received adequate medical care. Today he is back in Ho Chi Minh City, and suffers from diabetes, painful rheumatism attacks, and lung infections.
For further information, contact Vincent Brossel at RSF, 5, rue Geoffroy Marie, Paris 75009, France, tel: +33 1 44 83 84 84, fax: +33 1 45 23 11 51, e-mail: asie@rsf.fr Internet: http://www.rsf.fr
