ARCHIVE: Honorary Member, Father Nguyen Van Ly Released - March 15 2010 — 19.03.2010
Honorary Members and subject of our centre’s recent advocacy campaign, Father Thadeus Nguyen Van Ly has been probationally released from imprisonment in Vietnam. Priest, scholar and signatory to the Bloc 8406 pro-democracy movement, Father Ly suffered two strokes in 2009 and has been in solitary confinement and in partial paralysis in recent months. Father Ly was released on Monday March 15th, five years shy of his eight-year sentence handed down in March 2007 for “harming national security”.
Since 2007 our letter-writers and members have campaigned Ambassador to Vietnam, Allaster Cox, to raise Father Ly’s case with the Vietnamese government. Cox has been responsive to our campaigns, raising the case at the 7th Australia-Vietnam Human Rights Dialogue in December and again in February. Father Ly has been featured in The Empty Chair at UTS Broadway and at several of our recent events in Sydney. US advocacy group, Freedom Now, filed a petition with the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention in February, backed by several US senators.
Father Ly has spent over 15 years in prison since 1977, over a long career of human rights activism. He was probationally released to his family and diocese in stable health but with long-term ailments apparently resulting from his strokes and imprisonment. Sydney PEN will continue to monitor news of Father Ly and to urge the Vietnamese government to release him unconditionally from probation.