TWO CANADIANS IN VIETNAM: JUSTICE DENIED

A frail 74-year-old woman is set to be free as early as today to return
from Vietnam to Canada, the country that has been her home since shortly
after the Communist regime took over her native South Vietnam in 1975.

Tran Thi Cam, a Canadian citizen, has spent more than four years in a Hanoi
cell after a seriously flawed trial in which she was found guilty of drug
trafficking. She has yet to be formally told that her 43-year-old daughter,
Nguyen Thi Hiep, also a Canadian citizen, was executed on the same charges
in April, despite Ottawa's pleas to the Vietnamese government to examine
Toronto police evidence that suggested the pair's innocence.

The story of Ms. Cam and her daughter leaves no doubt as to the regime's
ruthlessness, despite the return to Vietnam in recent years of thousands of
boat people who had fled the Communist regime after reunification in 1975,
and despite the government's reported increased openness to discussing
human rights.

When Ms. Hiep's body was finally handed over to relatives two weeks ago,
one of her ears was missing, raising suspicions of torture. If, despite
diplomatic pressure from Canada, the Vietnamese government tortured Ms.
Hiep, then executed her before all the evidence in her case had been
considered, and continued to hold her mother, then what hope for the
average Vietnamese citizen?

No one can provide a systematically documented human-rights picture of
Vietnam. Despite its ratification in 1982 of the International Covenant on
Civil and Political Rights, the regime does not allow national human-rights
groups to operate there, nor will it permit entry to foreign organizations
on fact-finding missions. Yet information does filter out through a network
of dissidents. Ms. Cam has yet to tell her story about her detention in
Xuan Phuong prison in Hanoi, but it is likely to again confirm that
Vietnam's jails do not meet the United Nations' Standard Minimum Rules for
the Treatment of Prisoners. Solitary confinement, pressure to sign
confessions and forced labour are known to be commonplace, as are sham
trials by a judiciary controlled by the executive branch.

Nonetheless, Vietnam's high-profile dissidents are increasingly less likely
to be imprisoned. The traditional prisoner of conscience is gradually being
replaced by the victim of house arrest. This has been the fate, for
example, of Ha Sy Phu, a biologist and former director of the Vietnamese
Institute of Science in Dalat. His crime was to pen a series of essays
directed at the Communist Party, questioning Communist ideology. Since his
release from prison in December of 1996, he has been under house arrest.
His family, as well as visitors to his house in Lam Dong province, are
constantly harassed, and public security agents have searched his house on
several occasions, seizing his computer and other personal belongings.
Although the searches have turned up no incriminating evidence, Mr. Phu now
faces new charges of treason, which could lead to a death sentence.

Political dissidents are not the only targets. After the UN special
rapporteur on religious intolerance highlighted "serious concerns"
following his 1998 visit to Vietnam, the regime passed a decree outlawing
any religious organizations that oppose the government, as well as
undefined "superstitious practices." Among the victims: the banned Unified
Church of Vietnam, members of the Hoa Hao sect of Buddhism and some
Protestant evangelical churches.

The government has also approved legislation to support its repressive
practices. Administrative Detention Decree 31/CP, for example, allows any
civil servant from any level of government to detain any citizen suspected
of being a possible security threat. And law 89/ND-CP allows provincial
police and military officers to detain people without trial in temporary
detention camps.

Special laws have also been passed to encourage self-censorship by the
press. Journalists are required to pay compensation or publish retractions
to persons hurt by their reports, even if the information published is correct.

The spirit of this law is an attempt to hide from the world the cases of
thousands of Tran Thi Cams or Nguyen Thi Hieps, and to stifle those who
defend a principle that encapsulates the struggle of the Vietnamese people.
This principle was expressed recently by Doan Viet Hoat, a Vietnamese
journalist in exile in the United States and a former prisoner of
conscience: "No person, no matter how strong he is, how wise he might be,
has the right to decide for other people what they can do, what they can
believe."

Neither Ms. Hiep nor Ms. Cam were arrested for defending this principle.
But the way they were dealt with gives some idea of the kind of treatment
facing those who dare to assert their freedom of spirit. Let the case of
Ms. Hiep and Ms. Cam be a reminder to Canada that it must continue to be
vigilant. The message to Vietnam is simple: Clean up your human-rights
record and you will be welcomed into the international community.

Former solicitor-general Warren Allmand is president of Rights & Democracy,
a Montreal-based non-partisan institution.