By my own experience and as far as I know, for a country of 90 million people we have a total of five practising human rights lawyers. These five are constantly harassed and intimidated by the government. I'm afraid that if this keeps going on we'll soon have four, then three, then two, and then we'll get to zero.
I have had the opportunity to at least communicate with some of these five brave individuals in the past to see and understand how difficult life can be for them.
So why? It is because I think 10 or even five years ago there was no such thing as human rights lawyers in Vietnam. In recent years we have begun to see people who are willing to take on these cases because again we can see that over the last 10 years the control of the Vietnamese government over society is cracking. As more and more people are challenging the government, and as more and more people are being brought to trial, there is a need for some lawyers to speak out and to defend these people. It is because of that need we have begun to see people come out and take on these cases.
A few years back we had more than five, but now we've dropped down to five. The government knows that one of the ways to discourage people to take these cases to court and one of the ways to silence people is to put pressure on these human rights lawyers so that they will not take on these cases anymore, and these people will go to trial with no legal representation—none whatsoever.