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:
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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.
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Lanney Tran
