Vietnam rejects activist’s appeal against sentence

By Bennett Murray

HANOI (AA) - A Vietnamese activist will return to jail to finish a 20-month prison term over her role in organizing protests against land grabs after losing an appeal in a Hanoi courtroom Wednesday.

Can Thi Theu, 54, was convicted of “disrupting public order” in September following her June arrest in the Vietnamese capital, where she led protests against land grabs.

“She will not get any reduction,” defense lawyer Ha Huy Son confirmed to Anadolu Agency on Wednesday after her half-day hearing.

Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director for Human Rights Watch, claimed in a statement that Theu was a victim of a “kangaroo court”.

“The only real justice that the appeal court could have provided for Can Thi Theu was to dismiss these bogus charges and immediately release her, but this being Vietnam and its kangaroo courts, there was never any possibility of that,” he said.

Land confiscation has become a contentious issue in Vietnam in recent years as small landowners get evicted for large-scale construction projects.

Demonstrations against the evictions are fairly common in Hanoi, although they are usually quickly suppressed by security forces.

Public protests are illegal in Vietnam, and the country’s penal code provides the government great leeway in imprisoning people for “disrupting public order” and spreading “propaganda against the state.”