Tran Hiep, a Melbourne-based Vietnamese-Australian democracy campaigner, is currently detained in a notorious detention centre in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, after his sudden arrest last month. He spent his 51st birthday alone in detention, having not been heard from since mid-September when Vietnamese authorities detained him for alleged terrorism and forging identity documents.
Background
The alarm was first raised by his wife, Chloe Dang, when Hiep failed to board his flight from Phnom Penh, Cambodia, on September 18, where he was meeting with human rights defenders. For nearly two weeks, Hiep had apparently vanished until Vietnamese authorities confirmed he was in jail, awaiting trial.
More than three weeks later, Dang has been informed by Australian authorities that Hiep is being held in the B34 pre-trial detention centre in Ho Chi Minh City, a facility known for alleged human rights abuses against political prisoners.
““I will not stop worrying until I hear from him or see him with my own eyes,” Dang said. “Last week, he had to spend his birthday alone in detention. We always do everything together, so the thought of that is truly heartbreaking for me.”
Dang is calling for Hiep's immediate and unconditional release. Hiep is the latest Australian human rights campaigner to be detained in Vietnam. Chau Van Kham, another Vietnamese-born Australian, was arrested in Vietnam in January 2019 and sentenced to 12 years’ imprisonment on charges of financing terrorism due to his membership in the pro-democracy group Viet Tan. He was released after four years in 2023.
Allegations and Reactions
Hiep, a freelance IT professional and founder of the Australian Alliance to Combat Human Trafficking, is also accused of being a member of Viet Tan, which the Vietnamese government labels as a terrorist group. Human Rights Watch has described Viet Tan as “an opposition political party … which operates openly and lawfully in many countries including Australia, but which Hanoi arbitrarily labels ‘terrorist’.”
