PHNOM PENH (AFP) – A Vietnamese democracy activist and blogger has been held in detention in Cambodia for more than a week accused of travelling on a fake passport, the police and his family told AFP yesterday.
Huynh Trong Hieu, part of a prominent dissident family that has spoken out on a wide range of political and social issues in Vietnam, was en route to the United States (US) when he was detained at Phnom Penh airport.
“He is under the detention of the immigration police,” spokesman for the immigration department Major General Sok Sumnea told AFP, adding that authorities were verifying whether he had entered Cambodia illegally.
His sister, also an outspoken blogger, told AFP that police had kept his passport and asked him to pay USD4,000 to be released.
Hieu, from Dak Lak province in the Central Highlands, was on this way to the US to visit friends before heading to Canada to see his son, Vy said.
“Hieu did not use a fake passport. We are ordinary citizens, not criminals,” she added.
All media in one-party Vietnam is state-run and independent bloggers are banned.
The country ranks 174th out of 180 countries in the Reporters Without Borders campaign group’s World Press Freedom Index.
Vy last year finished a 33-month jail sentence after smearing white paint on a national flag.
Vy, who was a Human Rights Watch grant recipient for her political writing, told AFP that police had threatened to jail her again if she continued posting criticism of the government on Facebook or helping political prisoners.
She and her brother have been critical on a wide range of political and social issues in Vietnam, from ethnic minority rights to environmental disasters and freedom of expression.
The detention comes after prominent former lawyer Tran Dinh Trien was jailed in January for three years over Facebook posts containing “unauthenticated content” that “affected the reputation of the courts and the chief judge of the supreme court personally”.
On Wednesday, state media reported that prosecutors had finalised the indictment for leading independent journalist Truong Huy San, commonly known as Osin Huy Duc, after his arrest in June.
Shortly before the arrest, Duc took aim at Vietnam’s then-president To Lam, as well as Nguyen Phu Trong, the most powerful individual in the country’s political system. At the end of last year, a Thai court sentenced a prominent wanted Vietnamese hill tribe activist to six months in prison for illegally entering the kingdom and staying without a visa, although he had lived in exile in Thailand since 2018.
