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Dissident priest sentenced
Warned US Congress on human rights
A prominent Catholic priest has been sentenced by the Communist Vietnamese government to serve a 15-year prison term for allegedly having undermined the country’s unity.

Father Thaddeus Nguyen Van Ly had testified in February, in a deposition submitted to the US Congress, urging delay in the ratification of a bilateral trade agreement; he cited Vietnam’s human-rights violations and suppression of religion. The US requested the release of Father Van Ly after he was arrested in February, but the Communist government refused.

The priest’s sentencing could provide new impetus for a human-rights bill passed by the US House of Representatives and now being considered by the Senate. The law would condition future US non-humanitarian aid on Vietnam’s human rights record. However, the trade agreement Father Van Ly opposed has already been signed into law.

In a one-day trial, a court in central Hue city found Father Van Ly guilty of defying a detention order and “undermining the national unity policy of the state;” he was sentenced to serve a 2-year prison from the former offense, and 13 years for the latter.

Priest protests Catholic press award
Newspaper said to be government organ
A Vietnamese priest has protested the award bestowed by a Catholic journalists’ group on a Vietnamese newspaper, saying that the paper is a front for the Communist Party.

Father Stephen Chan Tin, a Redemptorist priest working in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), said the International Catholic Press Union had committed “an offense and a blow to the Catholics in Vietnam” by giving the Gold Medal 2001 to the Cong Gaio va Dan Toc newspaper. Father Chan Tin said that the paper is “Catholic only in name.” He added: “It is in actual fact the Communist Party channel for spreading propaganda among Catholics.”

Father Huynh Cong Minh, a former editor of the award-winning newspaper, has pledged his loyalty to the Communist regime, Father Chan Tin observed. And the paper has taken editorial stands in opposition to those of Church leaders—as, for example, when it called for the expulsion of the papal delegate in Vietnam after the Communist victory in 1975, or when it voiced disapproval at the canonization of 117 Vietnamese martyrs in 1988.

Back to Catholic World Report December 2001 Table of Contents