South China Morning Post
October 29 1998

A Buddhist leader from a banned church in Vietnam was placed under house arrest immediately after he was released from jail under a general amnesty last week, a rights group said yesterday

Thich Nhat Ban, a leader of the outlawed Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam, was taken straight from his re-education camp in Xuan Loc in the southern province of Dong Nai on Saturday to his former pagoda in southern Linh Phong.

The pagoda has been surrounded by security police barring him from leaving or having any contact.

Vietnamese authorities yesterday would neither confirm nor deny the report by the Vietnam Committee on Human Rights based near Paris.

He was sentenced in 1995 to four years in prison after organizing the previous year a humanitarian mission to the southern Mekong delta and was accused of "disrupting public order".

Earlier, he served 10 years in a labour camp from 1975-1985 for belonging to the church which is not recognized by the communist state.

Mr. Ban, now 61, "is in urgent need of medical care", the rights group said in a statement.

Furthermore he was only released 13 days before the end of his sentence, as he had been arrested in November 1994, and was due to be freed next month.

He was the only religious prisoner to be freed among 2,630 prisoners granted amnesties over the weekend.

The committee added that the church's No 2, Thich Quang Do, who was prevented by police from meeting with UN Special Rapporteur Abdelfattah Amor on Monday, is no longer allowed to have visitors. His pagoda has been surrounded by police, the group said.

Mr. Amor confirmed before leaving Vietnam yesterday that he had been prevented from meeting with Mr. Do, secretary-general of the Unified Buddhist Church.