2 TNLT Việt Nam được vinh danh: Tạ Phong Tần và Bùi Thị Minh Hằng
Lanney Tran
- Tại buổi họp báo ngày hôm qua, 1 tháng 9, Đại Sứ Hoa Kỳ tại Liên Hiệp
Quốc cho biết Hoa Kỳ sẽ nêu tên của 20 nữ tù nhân lương tâm trên thế
giới tại hội nghị cao cấp về nữ quyền được tổ chức ở trụ sở Liên Hiệp
Quốc ở New York vào ngày 27 tháng 9 tới đây. Trong số đó có hai nữ tù
nhân lương tâm Việt Nam: Cô Tạ Phong Tần và Bà Bùi Thị Minh Hằng.
Nữ Đại Sứ Samantha Power, đại diện Hoa Kỳ tại LHQ, cho biết là hội nghị
sắp đến sẽ đánh dấu hành trình 20 năm kể từ hội nghị toàn cầu về nữ
quyền được tổ chức lần đầu năm 1995 ở Bắc Kinh, Trung Quốc.
Giới chức của 189 quốc gia và 30 nghìn người tranh đấu cho nữ quyền đã
tham gia hội nghị này -- Đệ Nhất Phu Nhân Hillary Clinton dẫn đầu phái
đoàn Hoa Kỳ. Kết quả của hội nghị là "Bản Tuyên Bố Bắc Kinh" vạch ra
những nguyên tắc và một phương án hành động chung để phát huy quyền của
phụ nữ trên toàn thế giới.
Mục tiêu của hội nghị sắp đến, tổ chức ở New York, sẽ đề ra phương án
cho 20 năm kế tiếp và do đó được mệnh danh là Hội Nghị Bắc Kinh +20.
"Nhưng sẽ có một số phụ nữ mà tiếng nói của họ vô cùng quan trọng thì
lại sẽ vắng mặt tại cuộc đối thoại ở hội nghị Bắc Kinh +20", Bà Power phát biểu tại buổi họp báo. "Tôi muốn nói đến tiếng nói của các nữ tù nhân lương tâm."
Bà cho biết là từ đây đến ngày 27 tháng 9, văn phòng của Bà sẽ có cả một
chiến dịch để làm nổi bật vấn đề tù nhân lương tâm phái nữ qua 20 hồ sơ
tiêu biểu:
"Và mỗi ngày trong tuần từ giờ đến hội nghị Bắc Kinh +20, chúng tôi
sẽ chia sẻ câu chuyện về một người trong số những phụ nữ này với chi
tiết đầy đủ hơn. Tên của họ. Họ là ai. Họ đến từ đâu. Tại sao họ bị bắt
giam. Và các chính quyền đang lấy đi tự do của họ -- đó là các chính
quyền sẽ cử phái đoàn đến dự hội nghị Bắc Kinh +20 ở New York."
Cô Tạ Phong Tần là người số 12 và Bà Bùi Thị Minh Hằng số 19. Như vậy Cô
Tạ Phong Tần sẽ được vinh danh tại trụ sở LHQ ở New York ngày Thứ Tư 16
tháng 9 và Bà Bùi Thị Minh Hằng ngày Thứ Sáu 25 tháng 9.
"Sự việc này sẽ giúp đẩy mạnh hơn nữa cuộc vận động đòi tự do cho tù nhân lương tâm Việt Nam", Ts. Nguyễn Đình Thắng, Tổng Giám Đốc kiêm Chủ Tịch BPSOS, nhận định. "Vấn
đề sẽ được đưa vào diễn đàn quốc tế hết sức quan trọng này, và Việt Nam
không thể tránh né vì sẽ có phái đoàn tham dự và hơn nữa Việt Nam đang
là thành viên của Hội Đồng Nhân Quyền LHQ."
BPSOS phát động Chiến dịch Tự Do Cho Tù Nhân Lương Tâm Việt Nam ngày 23
tháng 7, 2013. Một phần quan trọng của chiến dịch này là vận động các
dân biểu và thượng nghị sĩ Hoa Kỳ kết nghĩa với các tù nhân lương tâm
Việt Nam.
Nữ Dân Biểu Sheila Jackson Lee (Dân Chủ, Texas) đã kết nghĩa với Cô Tạ
Phong Tần và Thượng Nghị Sĩ Bill Cassidy (Cộng Hoà, Louisiana) đã kết
nghĩa với Bà Bùi Thị Minh Hằng.
Theo nhận định của Ts. Thắng, vấn đề tù nhân lương tâm có thể tạo khó
khăn cho Việt Nam trong việc tham gia Hiệp Ước Đối Tác Xuyên Thái Bình
Dương (TPP).
"Rất khó để cho Hành Pháp Hoa Kỳ thuyết phục các vị dân biểu và
thượng nghị sĩ đã tham gia chương trình kết nghĩa để ủng hộ cho Việt Nam
vào TPP khi mà tù nhân lương tâm được họ kết nghĩa vẫn còn ở trong nhà
tù."
Theo Ts. Thắng, trong dịp ân xá ngày 2 tháng 9 vừa qua, chỉ một người
trong danh sách tù nhân lương tâm của BPSOS là được trả tự do trước khi
mãn hạn tù: Ông Võ Văn Phụng thuộc nhóm 25 thành viên Ân Đàn Đại Đạo bị
xử án tù trong vụ "Hội Đồng Công Luật Công Án Bia Sơn".
"Quốc Hội sẽ trở lại làm việc sau ngày Lễ Lao Động vào tuần tới; khi
ấy chúng tôi sẽ tiếp tục cuộc vận động đòi tự do vô điều kiện cho tất cả
tù nhân lương tâm," Ts. Thắng cho biết. "Chúng tôi sẽ vận động Quốc Hội dùng hội nghị Bắc Kinh +20 để tạo áp lực với chính quyền Việt Nam."
Toàn văn buổi họp báo của Đại Sứ Samantha Power:
*
Remarks at the FreeThe20 Campaign Launch
Samantha Power
U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations
Washington, DC
September 1, 2015
AS DELIVERED
AMBASSADOR POWER: Thank you. Good afternoon. Twenty years ago, 189
governments and approximately 30,000 nongovernmental organizations –
activists from around the globe convened in Beijing for a world
conference to advance gender equality and women’s rights. The U.S.
delegation was led by then-First Lady Hillary Clinton, who set the tone
not only for the conference, but also for a generation of advocacy on
women’s rights when she declared that, “Human rights are women’s rights
and women’s rights are human rights.” After two weeks of intense
negotiations, the 189 countries adopted the Beijing Declaration and
Platform for Action, an ambitious roadmap for empowering women and
promoting women and girls’ human rights everywhere.
On September 27th, 20 years after the Beijing Declaration, nations from
around the world will take part in another high-level conference, this
time at the United Nations in New York, with the aim of agreeing upon a
new set of concrete commitments to advance women’s rights for the next
20 years. The discussion will look both at the areas where the world has
made meaningful progress and those where we have not. Like Beijing, the
conference will be ambitious in its breadth and aims to include a
diverse set of voices.
But there will be some women whose critically important voices will be
missing from the dialogue around the Beijing+20 conference. Voices that
would add a lot to discussions not only about advancing women’s rights,
but all human rights. Women who have worked to promote freedom of
expression and assembly; to ensure people’s right to basic health care
and education; and to defend children, refugees, and other vulnerable
members of our societies. I am talking about the voices of women
political prisoners and other prisoners of concern.
Today, we are here to launch a campaign to recognize 20 of those women –
women who should be advocating for women’s empowerment and part of the
discussions around the Conference in New York in three weeks, rather
than being behind bars. We are calling them the Beijing+20 twenty. And
every weekday leading up to the Beijing +20 conference, we are going to
share the story of one of these women in greater detail. Their names.
Who they are. Where they are from. Why they have been unjustly locked
up. And the governments that are depriving them of their freedom.
Governments that will be sending delegations to the Beijing+20
conference in New York.
These are just twenty out of the many women who are being deprived of
their freedom and the right to participate in the Beijing+20 conference.
In naming these women, we are sending a message to their governments
and others like them: If you want to empower women, don’t imprison them
on the basis of their views or on the basis of the rights that they are
fighting for. Free these 20 women and free the countless women and girls
like them behind bars, because these 20 women only represent a tiny
fraction of the women currently being unjustly imprisoned. And the
governments detaining them are just a handful of the governments around
the world that are locking up women for exercising their fundamental
freedoms.
In naming these women, we are also seeking to send a message to the 20
prisoners and their families, and to others like them: We have not
forgotten about you. We will keep pressing for your governments to free
you. We will continue to remind people of what is lost when you are
excluded not only from the conversations like the one coming up in New
York, but from your communities and your societies. We will insist on
reminding the world how much we lose when your voices are silenced –
today and every day that you are behind bars.
The first of the 20 is Wang Yu, a 44-year-old prisoner in the country
where the historic 1995 Beijing Conference was held: China. A commercial
lawyer by training, Wang’s activism was sparked in 2008, when employees
at a train station refused to let her board a train with her ticket.
After demanding the right to board, Wang was assaulted by several men
and then – even though she was the one who had been beaten – convicted
to two-and-a-half years in prison for what was called “intentional
assault.” She later told a reporter, “After my miscarriage of justice… I
wanted to improve China's human rights system.”
Wang did that by taking on the cases of clients who other lawyers feared
to represent, such as Ilham Tohti, a prominent Uighur scholar
eventually sentenced to life in prison; Cao Shunli, a woman human rights
activist who died in March 2014 after reportedly being denied medical
treatment while in detention; and those who are known as the “Five
Feminists” – young women who were detained in advance of International
Women’s Day in March of this year for planning a campaign against sexual
harassment. For her work, Wang has been harassed, threatened, and
smeared in the state-run media. On July 9th, 2015, Wang herself was
detained. So was her husband, along with their 16-year-old son. Wang and
her husband remain in prison, where they have been denied regular
access to a lawyer in custody and have not yet been charged. Their son
was released, but is under constant surveillance and has been barred
from leaving the country. When at least 159 Chinese lawyers and
activists signed a petition calling for Wang’s release, many of them
were detained as well.
Responding to attacks against her in the state-run press, Wang once
wrote, “I believe that during this time of enlightenment and rapid
development of the internet…any shameful attempt to smear me is doomed
to fail.” She said, “The truth cannot be long hidden.” In raising Wang’s
case today and others like it in the days to come, we aim to help her
and others expose some of that truth. Let me repeat her name – it is
Wang Yu.
We will continue to repeat Wang Yu’s name, and that of other women like
her, over the coming days. Women like the brave Azeri journalist Khadija
Ismayilova – another one of the 20 – who just today was sentenced to
seven-and-a-half years in prison. To the media we urge: write about
these cases. To members of these women’s communities and to our own
communities, we urge: take up their cases as your own, and demand their
release. And to the governments imprisoning these twenty individuals we
urge: if you want to empower women, start by releasing these women.
Don’t deprive your societies and the world of these women’s voices.
Thank you. And I will now take a few questions.
QUESTION: I’ve got one logistical one and a technical one, and then a
more substantive one. The North Korean prisoner, is that a composite or
is – you have actually someone in mind; you just don’t want to endanger
even more by naming her? That’s the technical question.
AMBASSADOR POWER: Okay. I’ll take all your questions and then respond.
QUESTION: And then the other one is – you’ve got three from Ethiopia on
here, three from China. I’m curious – the national security advisor was
just in China. The Chinese president is making a state visit here. And
the President, our President, was just in Ethiopia, where he made some
comments praising its democracy. I’m just wondering if you see a discord
there.
And then lastly, are there no more political – women political prisoners
in Cuba? Or why no one from Cuba? Those are – that’s it.
AMBASSADOR POWER: Is that all?
QUESTION: That’s it.
AMBASSADOR POWER: Okay. First on DPRK, I will say that there are more
than 100,000 political prisoners in North Korea that we know about, and
the conditions in the network of prisons in North Korea are unspeakable,
the risk to any specific individual in those prisons excessive. And so
all things considered, the judgment was made, number one, there are so
many political prisoners that singling any one woman out – or girl out
for that matter – in a way wouldn’t reflect the scope and the scale of
the challenge; and two, again, that the risk could be substantial to
that individual.
QUESTION: So it’s a composite.
AMBASSDOR POWER: It’s a composite.
On the second question regarding China and Ethiopia, I think in fact
what this campaign, which is an Administration-wide campaign that
everyone in this Administration is very enthusiastic about and very
sincerely committed to, really reflects the centrality of human rights
to our relationship with these countries. We, with both China and
Ethiopia, and I see this every day at the United Nations, have
incredibly productive and important business that we do together around
collective security challenges and around a whole set of shared
interests.
At the same time, the human rights issues in countries, regardless of
who they are and regardless of how productively we work with them in
other realms, need to be raised. And they are – as President Obama said
on his trip to Ethiopia, the full potential of Ethiopia will not be
unleashed and unlocked until journalists are able to report on what’s
going in the country freely and opposition – credible opposition
candidates are able to participate in elections. I mean, he said that on
his trip and Ambassador Rice’s trip – National Security Advisor Rice’s
trip to China in advance of the Xi visit had human rights as one of the
key agenda items. So this is very much in keeping with
Administration-wide commitments and the tradition of raising these
issues repeatedly, seeking outcomes that, as this poster behind me
reflects, outcomes that we have not yet achieved and so we will keep
raising until we see progress in these areas – significant progress.
In terms of any specific country, I mean, you could – there are a lot of
political prisoners and a lot of women political prisoners around the
world. This is – we are doing one prisoner per day, again, for
representing one year between now and Beijing in 1995. The specific
inclusion of several from one country is no specific sign of anything,
nor is the exclusion from another. You’ll see a pretty diverse range of
governments represented here. And all I would say is that we were
looking for representative prisoner cases. We did a lot of consultation
to select this group. Oftentimes, that was with NGOs as well as with our
own embassies and people who are a little closer to where these
individuals are being held. In some cases, we engaged via our embassies
or NGOs with the families of people that we were considering profiling,
and some were not enthusiastic about being profiled and that was a very,
of course, a dispositive factor.
QUESTION: Okay. But it’s not the case that the Administration does not believe there are any --
AMBASSADOR POWER: We are not pulling our punches on any particular country.
QUESTION: Okay.
MR TONER: Go ahead, Arshad.
QUESTION: Did National Security Advisor Rice raise the case of Wang Yu
or of any other specific political prisoners in China on her last trip?
And do you expect the President to raise Wang Yu or any other specific
individuals when he meets with President Xi next – or later this month?
And then secondly, if those kinds of cases are not raised at the very
highest level, why should the Chinese or any other government take your
concerns seriously?
AMBASSADOR POWER: Thank you. I’m not in a position here to disclose
private diplomatic communications that Ambassador Rice has had just over
the course of the last week, and she’s gone from China to Pakistan, is
now up in the Arctic, so I also haven’t had a chance to speak with her.
But as I said earlier, human rights was a key, core issue on the trip –
on her trip, and it is going to be a key, core issue when President Xi
visits Washington. I can, again, not at this point speak to what our
plans are vis-a-vis the visit. We’re working a lot of elements through,
even as we speak. But it has been the practice in any prior trip,
certainly that I’ve had any insight into, that the President has raised a
set of specific cases, and I would expect that to be the case on this
trip as well.
In terms of who will make it onto the list, these are extremely
important cases as is evinced here by the, again, the entire national
security apparatus standing behind this list of prisoners. So I would
have every expectation that these individuals would be on the list, but
again, can’t be a prophet here at this point.
MR TONER: Said, go ahead.
QUESTION: Yes. Yeah, thank you. Are we likely to see a list of
Palestinian women present on this – added to this list? I mean, some
have languished for decades in Israeli prison, even giving childbirth
while in prison. There is one in particular, a Palestinian legislator,
Khalida Jarrar, who has been imprisoned for defying Israeli orders to be
deported to Jericho from Ramallah. Could you comment on that?
AMBASSADOR POWER: I am not familiar, again, with the specifics of the
case so I can’t comment on that. I would just say, again, we are – look,
this list is a representative list, not an exhaustive list. I also want
to stress that this is not the sum total of our efforts on political
prisoners around the world by any means. This is a group of women
prisoners; it’s not by any means close to a complete list of women
prisoners. So it would be very misleading to think that somehow this is
the – this is the sum total of our bilateral efforts or even our
multilateral efforts to secure either more humane treatment or the
release of particular political prisoners.
QUESTION: So this does not represent the dismissal of the fact that there are Palestinian women in Israeli prisons today?
AMBASSADOR POWER: Again, I’d want to speak to the facts of a specific case, which I’m not in a position to do.
MR TONER: Last question. Go ahead.
QUESTION: As you said, Ambassador, there are many political prisoners,
and I’m just intrigued to know what the criteria that you chose to
profile 20. I mean, you mentioned or alluded to say that it was
recommend – a recommendation from the embassy or the families, et
cetera. And are these all political prisoners held by governments, and
therefore you’re calling on governments? And what about the women who
are held by militias or armed groups like, for example, Razan Zaitouneh,
who’s a very famous Syrian activist?
AMBASSADOR POWER: Again, just to underscore, we have lots of different
venues and vehicles for raising a whole series of cases that are not
reflected by the image behind me and that will not be reflected by the
specifics associated with this Beijing+20 twenty. So whether that’s male
political prisoners, where it’s – whether it’s a whole host of other
women political prisoners, whether it’s prisoners who are in the hands
of militia or terrorist groups and so forth, we’re raising those on a
daily basis in different channels trying to secure release. This is an
effort to lift up in a way the welfare of a – of basically the whole
community of political prisoners by choosing 20 over the course of this
20-day period. So it’s not intended to be exclusionary; it’s intended,
again, to be representative, illustrative, and of course, it’s intended
to focus attention on these very specific cases.
In terms of your very good and fair question about sort of the selection
process and so forth, I mean, as you’ll see as we roll out each of the
cases each day, every prisoner that we have chosen to profile in this
20-day campaign has a specific story, and we wanted to lift up a range
of different profiles of political prisoners. You might ask, well, why
have a few from one country? Why not have 20 countries represented? If,
again, the facts of a particular case, if the family was enthusiastic or
if NGOs thought that there was actually potentially a chance to secure
release by raising up the profile, we didn’t want to let the fact that
several other – a couple other prisoners from that country were on the
list disqualify somebody.
So it was sort of more of an art than a science, I would say, but we
felt that this together was a strong list of individuals who would both
reflect their own experiences and the tremendous work that women are
doing all around the world in civil society, in opposition, in media, in
their own communities, in health care, in lawyering, you name it, but
we also thought this would be a good representative group for those who
aren’t actually depicted in the campaign itself.
QUESTION: Thank you.
MR TONER: Thank you so much, Ambassador. We appreciate it.
AMBASSADOR POWER: Okay. Thank you, Mark. Thanks again.
###
Lanney Tran
