After two years in jail, Vietnamese blogger Nguyen Ngoc Nhu Quynh was released by the government and immediately exiled to the United States.
This article was originally published on rsf.org on 17 October 2018.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) hails today’s release of the Vietnamese blogger known as Mother Mushroom, who immediately left for the United States, and calls on the authorities to free all the other citizen-journalists imprisoned in Vietnam.
Nguyen Ngoc Nhu Quynh, who used the blog name of Me Nâm (Mother Mushroom), had spent a total two years and seven days in Vietnam’s prisons when she was finally freed this morning and allowed to leave for the United States, where she will live with her two children and her mother.
Arrested in October 2016, she was subjected to eight months of solitary confinement before being sentenced to ten years in prison in June 2017. The authorities never stopped trying to break her and transferred her in February of this year to a prison 1,000 km from her family, located near Nha Trang, a coastal city in the south of the country.
She nonetheless always refused to confess to “anti-state propaganda,” the charge on which she was convicted, because all she had done as a blogger was inform the public about environmental problems and human rights. While in prison, she staged several hunger strikes in protest against the conditions in which she was held.
“We welcome Me Nâm’s release, but it is unacceptable that a woman had to spend more than two years in prison just for wanting to inform her fellow citizens,” said Daniel Bastard, the head of RSF’s Asia-Pacific desk. “Our thoughts are with the dozens of other bloggers still languishing in Vietnamese prisons for trying to be the voice of those who are ignored by the regime’s propaganda. They must also be freed.”
Me Nâm’s release was unexpected. It coincided with US defence secretary Jim Mattis’s second visit to Vietnam, which had prompted speculation about a possible goodwill gesture by the Vietnamese leadership. Washington has in the past forged close relations with Vietnam in a bid to offset China’s influence.
