Thích Huyen Quang

Thích Huyền Quang was a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, dissident and activist as Patriarch of the Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam, a currently banned organisation in his homeland.

In 1945 he joined the movement resisting French colonial rule, but in 1951 he was jailed by Viet Minh revolutionaries for refusing to submit to communist control. Released in 1954, Quang was returned to prison in 1963 after challenging the US-backed South Vietnamese regime of the Catholic President, Ngo Dinh Diem, for its discrimination against Buddhists. Later that year he was appointed deputy leader of the newly formed UBCV.

In 1977, Huyền Quang wrote a letter to then-Prime Minister Phạm Văn Đồng detailing counts of oppression by the communist regime. For this, he and five other senior monks were arrested and detained. In 1982, Huyền Quang was arrested and subsequently put into permanent house arrest at his monastery for opposition to governmental policy after publicly denouncing the establishment of the state-controlled Vietnam Buddhist Church. That year, he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1993 he issued a “Buddhist Proposal for Democracy and Human Rights”, proposing not only religious freedom, but also free elections in a multi-party system.

Huyền Quang died peacefully on July 5 2008 at his monastery after returning to house arrest from the hospital for treatment of the heart, lung and kidneys.