On May 18, 2021, Germany’s Pen Center (PEN) named Vietnamese independent journalist Pham Doan Trang as its honorary member and demanded her immediate release. She is one of the most famous Vietnamese government critics and was arrested on October 6, 2020, at her apartment in Ho Chi Minh City. She faces 20 years in prison on charges of conducting propaganda against the state.
Mr. Ralf Nestmeyer, Vice Chairman and Representative of the “Writers-in-Prison-Committee” of PEN Germany said: “Vietnam is one of the countries in the world where limited freedom of speech is particularly intense. The Communist Party brutally represses media workers to the point where Trang is now not allowed to contact her family and lawyers. We demand the immediate and unconditional release of our honorary member Pham Doan Trang and assure her of our unlimited solidarity.”
Pham Doan Trang is the founder of the online magazine Luat Khoa (Law Initiatives) and an editor of The Vietnamese website. Both of these media make it easier for Vietnamese people to understand the country’s laws, protect their rights, and oppose the Communist Party’s authoritarian rules. A month before her arrest, Trang published a report in which she investigated a violent police raid on Dong Tam commune on the outskirts of Hanoi, because of protests from the villagers against government confiscation of their land.
Because of her work, Trang has been repeatedly targeted by Vietnamese authorities. In August 2018, she was beaten while in police custody and hospitalized. Now she is in danger of being assaulted again in prison. In 2014, she was awarded the Villa Aurora Feuchtwanger Fellowship in Los Angeles (The scholarship is named after the German-Jewish writer Lion Feuchtwanger, who had to leave Nazi Germany in 1933 and live in Villa Aurora in Los Angeles since 1943 until his death in 1958) and in 2019 she received the Press Freedom Award for exceptionally effective journalism from Reporters Without Borders.
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German PEN Center
The German PEN Center, with its headquarters in Darmstadt, is one of more than 150 worldwide writers’ associations united in PEN International. PEN stands for poets, essayists, and novelists. The association, originally founded in England in 1921, was intended to advocate for free speech and was seen as the voice of persecuted writers.
Hieu Ba Linh – Thoibao.de (Translation)
Thoibao.de: https://bit.ly/3hvLorE
