Hanoi - A Vietnamese court rejected the appeals of four activists jailed after they helped found an independent labour union and handed out pro-democracy leaflets, a judge confirmed Tuesday. Judge Nguyen Xuan Phat of Ho Chi Minh City's Supreme Court of Appeals said the court Monday upheld the sentences of the four activists to between 1.5 and 4.5 years in prison.
According to press accounts, Tran Thi Le Hong, Phung Quang Quyen, Doan Van Dien, and his son Doan Huy Chuong had collected complaints of government land-rights violations and passed them on to Western news sources, including Radio Free Asia.
They were also accused of distributing anti-government leaflets at a meeting in Hanoi before the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in November, 2006.
The four were sentenced under Article 258 of Vietnam's penal code, which bars "abusing democratic freedoms to infringe upon the interests of the State."
"They didn't have their sentences commuted at this time because the sentences were already soft, and cannot be cut any further," Phat said.
The four activists were affiliated with the United Workers-Farmers Organization, an independent labour union established in 2006 as part of a broader political dissident movement called Bloc 8406.
Over the course of 2007, a dozen democracy activists involved with Bloc 8406 were arrested and sentenced to prison, most under the penal code's Article 88, "Conducting propaganda against the Socialist Republic of Vietnam."
