Lawyers defending a Vietnamese religious group, whose members were convicted of incest and fraud in July 2022, have issued a statement protesting additional charges against one follower of the Peng Lei Buddhist House.
Two years ago, the People’s Court of Long An province sentenced Le Thanh Nhat Nguyen to four years in prison for “abusing democratic freedoms” under Article 331 of the criminal code.
However, they suspended a case of fraudulently obtaining a donation of VND 100 million (US$4,000), which they have now taken up again, according to lawyers Dao Kim Lan, Nguyen Van Mieng, and Dang Dinh Manh. The lawyers all fled Vietnam for the United States in June last year, fearing that they would be prosecuted for talking about the Peng Lei case in public.
According to the Thanh Nien online newspaper, Long An police records show that Nguyen, along with his mother Le Thu Van and sister Le Thanh Ky Duyen, received the money from a donor at a coffee shop in the province on Jan. 4, 2022.
Police said Nguyen told them money was donated by several people. However, he refused to sign a police report and was released,
In a statement on July 14, the three lawyers said Nguyen had been a monk since childhood but had never asked the public for help or donations.
“The decision of the Long An Provincial Security Investigation Agency to prosecute Mr. Le Thanh Nhat Nguyen for the crime of ‘fraud’ is completely malicious, unjust and illegal, to conceal their true purpose of suppressing freedom of belief,” the statement read.
The lawyers said evidence had been falsified and the Long An Province Security Investigation Agency had set a trap for Nguyen.
They called on Vietnamese authorities to suspend all legal proceedings related to Nguyen and other Peng Lei members, and to restore the monks’ legal rights.
Money receiving incident “staged”
Lawyer Dao Kim Lan said that the money-receiving incident was staged in order to have a pretext to arrest people and search their home, so that they could pursue charges of “abusing democratic freedoms.”
“They set it up to humiliate people … not to prosecute,” he told Radio Free Asia’s Vietnamese service. “Actually, their purpose was to prosecute under Article 331. There was no fraud, there was no need to prosecute.”
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Another lawyer Dang Dinh Manh said that since Nguyen had been a monk since childhood, it was completely normal for him to receive donations, like most other members of home-based monasteries in Vietnam.
“However, in order to create a pretext to convict Le Thanh Nhat Nguyen, the prosecuting agencies in Long An province blatantly stripped him of his monk status,” he told RFA Vietnamese.
“Since he no longer had the status of a monk, they had reason to conclude that Le Thanh Nhat Nguyen had committed fraud by taking advantage of the false pretense of religion to profit from public donations and donations.”
He said the government of Long An province is still looking for ways to completely destroy the Peng Lei religion.
“There are many reasons why [Peng Lei] was suppressed by Long An Provincial Police,” Manh added.
“The reason is [Peng Lei followers] dared to accuse the police of asking for bribes to issue identity cards, kidnapping people, violating women's bodies, and covering up for a group of criminals who invaded homes, assaulted people and stole property.”
RFA called Long An Provincial Police many times to request comment on the statement of the three lawyers but no one answered the phone.
Translated by RFA Vietnamese. Edited by Mike Firn and Taejun Kang.