Bui Thi Minh Hang
Quick Facts
Biography
Bui Thi Minh Hang (Vietnamese Bùi Thị Minh Hằng) is a Vietnamese activist and blogger. In 2016, Samantha Power, the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., named her one of twenty women political prisoners in the FreeThe20 campaign.
In 2011, Bui Thi Minh Hang protested in Hanoi and in Ho Chi Minh City against Chinese land claims on the Spratly and Paracel Islands. Police arrested her and sent her to sent her to Thanh Ha Education Center, a re-education camp in Vĩnh Phúc Province. There was an international protest about her arrest. She was in the reeducation camp for six months without a trial.
In 2012, Bui Thi Minh Hang was freed and returned to her work on human rights, writing about her time in the Thanh Ha Education center. She also published a “Manual for the Implementation of Human Rights” (Cam nang thuc thi quyen lam nguoi). In 2014, Bui Thi Minh Hang and a group of 21 bloggers and Hoa Hao Buddhist activists went to visit a political prisoner. The police arrested Bui Thi Minh Hang and two others. She was charged with disrupting traffic under Article 245 of the Penal Code. She was sentenced to three years in prison.
In 2016, Amnesty International reported Bui Thi Minh Hang had health problems in prison, but did not get medical care.