HANOI, Sept 27 (AFP) - The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) condemned communist-ruled Vietnam on Friday for detaining a local writer over an essay he wrote criticising the government's border agreements with China.
The New York-based press watchdog said Nguyen Vu Binh was being held incommunicado after security officials searched his home in Hanoi on Wednesday evening and arrested him.
No reason was given for his detention, but the CPJ said it was most probably linked to an article he wrote last month titled "Some Thoughts on the China-Vietnam Border Agreement," which was distributed over the Internet.
The land pact, signed in December 1999, more than 20 years after the two neighbours fought a brief but bloody border war in 1979, has drawn much flak from Vietnamese intellectuals as well as from certain sections of the military.
They have accused Hanoi of acceding too many territorial concessions to their more powerful communist neighbour.
Binh, a former journalist who worked for almost 10 years at the state-run Tap Chi Cong San (Review of Communism), stepped down from his post in January last year after applying to form an independent opposition group.
Since then he has written several articles calling for political reform, an anaethema to the ruling Communist Party.
In a letter to Vietnamese President Tran Duc Luong, Ann Cooper, the CPJ's executive director, appealed for Binh and fellow cyberdissident Le Chi Quang to be set free.
"As a non-partisan organization of journalists dedicated to defending press freedom worldwide, CPJ condemns the use of criminal charges against journalists," she said.
"We call for the immediate release of both Nguyen Vu Binh and Le Chi Quang."
Quang was detained on February 21 in the capital after writing an online essay criticising the land border agreement and the subsequent December 2000 accord outlining Sino-Vietnamese sea borders in the Gulf of Tonkin.
In August, his mother was informed that he would be tried on national security charges "soon", although no exact trial date has been announced.
Government officials were not immediately available for comment.
Intellectuals are increasingly using the web to circulate news or opinion banned from the tightly controlled state press, prompting the government to clamp down on Internet cafes.
International human rights groups have long charged Vietnam with smothering all political dissent and routinely jailing democracy activists or critics.
Hanoi maintains that freedom of speech is guaranteed under the constitution, but insists that individuals are not allowed to "abuse" this right by harming the interests of the state.
Binh was briefly detained in late July after submitting written testimony to a US Congressional Human Rights Caucus briefing on freedom of expression in Vietnam.
Since then, authorities have required him to report to his local police station on a daily basis, the CPJ said.