2007 Arrest
Nguyen Quoc Quan entered Vietnam on November 15, 2007 on a bicycle through the Cambodian border.
On November 17, 2007 along with two other Viet Tan members (Truong Van Ba, a Hawaii restaurant owner, and Frenchwoman Nguyen Thi Thanh Van, a contributor to Viet Tan's Radio Chan Troi Moi radio show) he was arrested in the southern suburb of Ho Chi Minh City. At the time, they were leading a "democracy seminar" and preparing pro-democracy pamphlets, when 20 security officers raided the house. Also arrested in the same group were Vietnamese citizens Nguyen The Vu, Nguyen Trong Khiem, Nguyen Viet Trung and Thai journalist Somsak Khunmi.
The two-page pamphlet titled "Non-Violent Struggle: The Approach To Overcome Dictatorship" (translated from Vietnamese) and asks protesters to "faithfully maintain the discipline of non-violence."
The arrests were not officially confirmed by the Vietnamese government until November 22, 2007. During the press briefing, officials declined to state which laws the detained individuals have broken, nor released any information about Nguyen Quoc Quan, whose whereabouts remained unknown for almost a week.
At the beginning, state-controlled media in Vietnam acknowledged jailing only some, but not all activists. The website of the newspaper Sai Gon Giai Phong originally showed an image of US national Nguyen Quoc Quan wearing prison garb, but hours later replaced it with a manipulated image of him wearing a white shirt. Subsequent articles also listed his nationality as "unknown".
Authorities in Vietnam have attempted to link the arrest of these Viet Tan members to two Vietnamese Americans who reportedly attempted to smuggle firearms into the country six days after the original arrests. However, Viet Tan has firmly denied any association with those individuals.
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“An unjust law is itself a species of violence. Arrest for its breach is more so.”
—Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869–1948)