Source: The Economist (20 June 2015)
ONE ordinary farmer, Nguyen Thanh Chan, is now a celebrity in Vietnam. In 2004 he was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of a woman in Nghia Trung, a village north-east of Hanoi, the capital. Yet he was released in 2013 after a neighbour, confronted with evidence, confessed to the crime. Earlier this month the country’s Supreme People’s Court announced that it would pay Mr Chan $360,000—many times what he would earn in a lifetime—as compensation for his nightmare.
The day after the announcement Mr Chan welcomed reporters to his one-storey farmhouse. He said that after his arrest police roughed him up and forced him to make a false confession. Had it not been for his wife’s long-shot campaign to clear his name, he might still be rotting in prison.
As in China, death-penalty statistics in Vietnam are state secrets. But Amnesty International, a rights group, says that at least three prisoners were executed last year and more than 700 face possible execution. Of the 72 who were sentenced to death in 2014 alone, four-fifths were found guilty of drug trafficking.Mr Chan’s case comes as the Vietnamese government attempts to reform the criminal-justice system. Proposed changes to the penal and criminal-procedure codes were discussed this week in the National Assembly, Vietnam’s tame parliament. In part, the Communist Party seems to be pursuing change as an easy way to curry favour with Western governments at a time when Vietnam faces heightened tensions with neighbouring China. Yet the reforms seem to be gathering a momentum of their own, including over capital punishment.
Now the assembly is debating whether to cut the number of crimes for which the death penalty applies to 15 from 22. Stealing and disobeying military orders would no longer be capital offences. Drug trafficking will remain one for now. Yet a Western diplomat in Hanoi who follows legal matters thinks that it, too, could go within a year. He adds that if that happened, Vietnam’s stance on capital punishment would instantly become among the most enlightened in South-East Asia. Only the Philippines has abolished it altogether.
Yet whatever the assembly decides, Vietnam’s criminal-justice system will remain deeply flawed. The criminal-procedure code permits harsh interrogation tactics, while the penal code is littered with clauses that criminalise, on grounds of national security, vaguely defined activities such as “conducting propaganda against the state”. In court, the judge is almost always a Communist Party member, while the two jurors who flank him typically have ties to the security state. Most prisoners who attempt to kick against the system are silenced. In one well-known example, Nguyen Van Ly, a Roman Catholic priest, accused the police and the court of practising the “law of the jungle”, whereupon a courtroom officer clamped a hand over his mouth. As for death row, inmates there are not told when their executions will take place, while questions swirl around how the executions are conducted. Four years ago the government gave up firing squads in favour of lethal injections. But because of a European Union ban on selling lethal-injection drugs, it switched to home-grown varieties. Doctors have been coerced into administering them.
But at least lawmakers are beginning to acknowledge irregularities in state prosecutors’ work. One controversial case they are reviewing concerns Ho Duy Hai, a man in the southern province of Long An who was convicted of murder in 2008. The evidence against him looks questionable. In December Vietnam’s president, Truong Tan Sang, suspended Mr Hai’s execution after behind-the-scenes pressure from Western diplomats.
Meanwhile, though the farmer, Nguyen Thanh Chan, still believes that the system broadly works, he wonders aloud if all crimes are being properly investigated. In his own case, the only reason the courts finally paid attention to his pleas of innocence was that his wife became an amateur gumshoe. After months of sleuthing, she showed up at the justice ministry, grabbed a bureaucrat by the collar and demanded the right to present reams of overlooked evidence. The ministry should give her a job.
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