On June 27th, 2015 small group of about 10 people stood anxiously outside of a prison in the central Quang Nam province. They were awaiting the release of Lê Quốc Quân. He had just spent 30 months in prison on trumped-up charges of tax evasion.
Quân had spent years vocally advocating for social justice and writing about human rights, making him the victim of relentless police harassment and violence. Lê Quốc Quân is a human rights lawyer and a former fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy, a US-based non-profit funded by the U.S. Congress.
The 43-year-old is back with his wife and three children in Hanoi and he went “On the Record” with Lilly Nguyễn of LOA, about life in captivity, his first days of freedom and the continued fight ahead.
Lilly: First of all, attorney Quân, thank you so much for joining me on Loa today. Before we start, I just want to see how you are doing, physically and emotionally, now that you are free.
Quân: Thank you very much for calling me and I’m very pleased to join you on Loa today. First of all, thank you for your question. I feel happy to meet my wife, my family, my brothers and friends who waited for me not only in front of the prison but also welcomed me at the airport when I came back to Hanoi.
Physically, I’m not so strong. I went on a hunger strike for 14 days before I was released. So generally, I feel so happy and full of emotions with a very good and clear mind.
Lilly: You spent 30 months in jail on tax evasion charges, but we all know that you were penalized for your work on human rights and your blogging activity. What was life in captivity like? Were you held in solitary confinement?
Quân: Yes, I have to say that I was in prison because of my human rights and my blogging activities. So they charged me on tax evasion, a “miscarriage of justice”. For the first 18 months, I was jailed in a 60 square meter room with 50 persons and I was kept with a lot of criminals like robbers and killers. And you know, that gave a very strong terrible pressure on my mental [health].
For the last year, after the appeal, they sent me to An Diem Prison [editor’s note: in central Quang Nam Province]. It’s about 800 km from Hanoi. In there, the life materially is better but I was kept in an area with ten prisoners of conscience. It’s kind of a prison within a prison.
We were kept there for ten people in a very small area, a small confinement. You can call it solitary confinement. And in each unit cell, were two people. And I stayed with one ethnic minority working for the Montagnard nation in the Central Highlands. He’s Montagnard but he cannot speak Vietnamese.
Of course I was treated differently from the other prisoners. They gave me better physical conditions, like eating. And they gave me a little more vegetable or some meat per week. Eating is okay for me. It’s acceptable but mentally, they put a lot of pressure on me.
I learned a lot from that time. I think that even though it was a hardship time, I feel better and I feel stronger. I am ready to challenge much more difficulties in the future…
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