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On February 21, 2002, Le Chi Quang, a young lawyer and computer teacher whose essay "Beware of Imperialist China" was distributed on the Internet, was arrested at an Internet café in Hanoi. His house was searched and documents confiscated. In October 2002, Quang was sentenced to four years in prison and three years of house arrest after a half-day closed trial in Hanoi on charges of disseminating propaganda against the state.
Le Chi Quang's indictment provides a telling picture of the Vietnamese government's attitude towards dissent. It details how security police arrested Quang when he was "caught in the act of entering an Internet café...to send email overseas." The indictment concludes that Le Chi Quang's crimes included calling for pluralism and a multi-party system, and writing, distributing and storing documents that "distorted" the political situation and the internal affairs of the Vietnamese Communist Party and the government, causing readers to "lose faith" in the party and the government.
Quang, who is incarcerated in Prison B14, suffers from serious kidney dysfunction, and there is concern that he has not been allowed to receive an appropriate diagnosis of his condition and effective medical treatment. He and another prisoner share a six-meter square cell, where they sleep on the dirt floor and relieve themselves in a bucket in the cell.
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