June 21, 2013
By Mike Ives
HANOI, Vietnam – Jailed legal scholar Cu Huy Ha Vu is ending a hunger strike linked to alleged poor treatment in a Vietnamese prison, his wife said Friday.
Nguyen Thi Duong Ha said Vu told her Friday that he will resume eating because he had received a written reply to the complaints he sent to prison officials in recent months.
Vu began fasting on May 27 in an effort to force officials at Prison No. 5 in northern Thanh Hoa province to answer his complaints. Vietnamese law requires the government to respond to citizens’ complaints within 90 days.
“I’m very happy,” Ha said by telephone Friday as she travelled from the prison to her home in the capital, Hanoi. “His hunger strike is a fight for justice.”
But she added that Vu is not satisfied with the prison’s response and plans to complain to a higher authority.
An official at the prison declined to comment.
Vu, 55, is among the ruling Communist Party’s highest-profile critics. His father Cu Huy Can was a revolutionary poet and a minister in the government of Vietnam’s founding president, Ho Chi Minh.
He was arrested in 2010 after attempting to sue Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung twice — first for approving a Chinese-built bauxite mining project in Vietnam’s central highlands, and later for prohibiting the filing of class-action lawsuits. The first suit was rejected by a Hanoi court, and the second was ignored.
In a one-day trial in April 2011, Vu was sentenced to seven years in jail and three of house arrest on charges that included conducting propaganda against the state, calling for multiparty government and demanding the abolishment of the party’s leadership.
Vu and his lawyers have complained officially that prison guards have prevented him from accessing evidence from his trial and from meeting privately with his wife when she visits. He also wrote that a prison guard tormented him by repeatedly opening his door.
Vietnam’s state-controlled media has attempted to raise doubts over whether Vu truly was fasting, although none of the newspaper or television reports offered conclusive proof that he was eating. A deputy prison chief was quoted Sunday as saying that Vu’s complaint about the guard opening his door was “completely paranoid.”
Vu is among the many government critics who have been imprisoned as the one-party authoritarian state cracks down on dissent amid widespread concerns over its handling of a stuttering economy. Three well-known bloggers have been arrested in the past month on charges of “abusing democratic freedoms.”
Source: The Gazette