The Vietnamese New Year, Tet Nguyen Dan, is a time of family reunion and feasting, of wishes of good fortune and health.
For three years now, Quynh Trang Truong has spent the Tet festival without her husband, Chau Van Kham, who languishes in a Vietnamese prison on terrorism charges, described by human rights groups as a “travesty of justice”.
In that time, Quynh has never been allowed direct contact, nor a single phone call – she has not seen her husband nor heard his voice.
“I’m very sad and I miss my husband very much,” she said this week from the Sydney home she has shared with him for decades.
“It has been three years, I worry he may die in jail.”
A Vietnamese-born Australian citizen, Chau was arrested in January 2019 and sentenced to 12 years imprisonment on “financing terrorism” charges over his membership of pro-democracy group Viet Tan.
Human rights advocates, lawyers and Chau’s family said the charges against him were baseless and politically motivated, his single-day multiple-defendant trial was grossly unfair and his failing health means his 12-year prison sentence is “effectively a death sentence”.
He has not had a face-to-face consular visit with Australian officials since April last year and there are concerns his health – the 72-year-old has a number of chronic conditions – is failing in prison. He shares a cell with 11 other prisoners and is allowed a single five-minute domestic phone call once a month, to a family member in Vietnam.
This month – three years since her husband was arrested – Quynh wrote to the Australian foreign affairs minister, Marise Payne, pleading for greater government intervention in his case.
“The Covid-19 pandemic has aggravated our stress and fear that our family and I will not be able to see him again. Therefore, I am writing this letter to seek your urgent support and interventions to facilitate my husband’s immediate release and deportation to Australia,” she wrote.
“Please help to save my beloved husband, as he is a friendly person who always wants to help and do better things for other people.
“My family and I miss him so much, as it has been three years since he was away and endures a prisoner’s life.”
Payne visited Hanoi in November to discuss Australia and Vietnam’s “strategic partnership”: her office confirmed the minister has raised Chau’s case in ministerial meetings.
A spokesperson for Payne’s department said it was providing consular assistance to Chau and was concerned for his health and welfare “given his age and the length of his sentence”.
His last consular visit was in April last year, before visits were suspended under Covid-19 control measures. Those restrictions were lifted earlier this month.
“Our embassy is seeking a consular visit as soon as possible,” the spokesperson said. “We continue to seek regular updates from Vietnamese authorities on Mr Kham’s welfare and request regular consular access.”
Australian lawyer Dan Phuong Nguyen, who is acting pro bono for Chau’s family, told the Guardian his wife was “very afraid for her husband”.
“At this time of year, too, Vietnamese New Year, it is really hitting home to her. She’s very afraid he might die in jail, that she might never see him again.”
Elaine Pearson, the Australia director of Human Rights Watch, said Chau’s conviction on terrorism charges was “a travesty of justice”.
“The Vietnamese government should pardon Chau and let him return to his family in Australia. Chau has suffered a lot in the last few years. We are very worried about inadequate medical treatment and he hasn’t even seen an Australian consular officer face-to-face since April 2021.”
Pearson said the Vietnamese government had a track record of releasing prisoners convicted of crimes into exile outside the country, following concerted political pressure.
Chau, an Australian citizen, was born in Vietnam and served in the South Vietnamese army before 1975. After the war, he was sent to a re-education camp for three years before he fled Vietnam by boat, arriving in Australia in 1983. In Sydney, he worked as a baker for decades, rising before dawn to work at a modest suburban bakery.
In 2010, he joined Viet Tan, becoming a key Australian organiser of pro-reform rallies and an outspoken advocate for democratisation in Vietnam.
The UN describes Viet Tan as “a peaceful organisation advocating for democratic reform”, but it was formally proscribed as a terrorist organisation in 2016 by the Vietnamese government, which said it was “a reactionary and terrorist organisation, always silently carrying out activities against Vietnam”.
Chau sought to return to Vietnam in 2019 to meet fellow pro-democracy advocates but was refused a visa.
He crossed into Vietnam via a land border with Cambodia in January that year, carrying a false identity document. He was arrested after meeting a democracy activist who, it is believed, was under surveillance, along with two Vietnamese nationals who were later sentenced to 11 and 10 years in prison respectively.
Chau was convicted and sentenced at his first appearance in the people’s court of Ho Chi Minh City after more than 10 months in detention.
The single-day judge-only trial, held simultaneously with four other people, saw him tried and convicted on charges of “financing terrorism” and sentenced to 12 years in jail, all within four hours.
The court was effectively closed – open only to approved people – for the entirety of the trial. His family was excluded. Viet Tan condemned Chau’s hearing as a “sham trial” and said it would “continue to support human rights defenders on the ground”.
Kylie Moore-Gilbert, the Australian academic who was detained in Iran for more than two years before being released in an Australian-government-engineered prisoner swap, said the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade “must do more to ensure his health doesn’t deteriorate further and demand his immediate release”.
