Case History
Nguyen Xuan Nghia is a poet, journalist, essayist, and novelist, a member of the Hai Phong Association of Writers, and a founding member of the banned democracy movement known as Bloc 8406. He is the editor of the underground democracy journal To Quoc (Fatherland) Review. As a journalist, he wrote for all the main government papers until 2003, when the government banned him because of his pro-democracy activities.
In 2006, Bloc 8406 created the Manifesto on Freedom and Democracy in Vietnam. The group’s name refers to the date that the manifesto was created. Originally signed by 118 dissidents, the number of signatories grew into the thousands.
On October 9, 2009, after a trial that reportedly lasted just a few hours, Nguyen Xuan Nghia was convicted of conducting anti-government propaganda under Article 88 of Vietnam’s penal code and sentenced to six years in prison. Article 88 forbids “all propaganda against the Communist system of government” as well as “slanderous allegations undermining national security, the social order and the people’s trust in the Party.”
The indictment against him, which was dated July 3, 2009, cited 57 pieces written by Nguyen Xuan Nghia from 2007 until his arrest in 2008, including poetry, literature, short stories, and articles that allegedly sought to “insult the Communist Party of Vietnam, distort the situation of the country, slander and disgrace the country’s leaders, demand a pluralistic and multiparty system…and incite and attract other people into the opposition movement.”