~ Le Viêt Nam, aujourd'hui. ~
The Vietnam News

[Year 1997]
[Year 1998]
[Year 1999]
[Year 2000]
[Year 2001]

Two get death sentence in Vietnam drug trial

HANOI - A Vietnamese court sentenced two men to death Friday after the three-day trial of a drugs ring accused of smuggling 106 kilogrammes of opium in from Laos, court officials said. The court in the northern town of Ninh Binh ordered mastermind Tran Van Thanh and accomplice Chu Van Khanh be executed, judge Dao Thi Tin told AFP.

Since 1997, possession of 100 grammes (three and a half ounces) of heroin or five kilogrammes (11 pounds) of opium has carried the death penalty here. Two men were sentenced to life imprisonment while the other 11 defendants received jail terms of between nine months and 20 years, the judge said. One of the other accused had already been sentenced to death in an earlier trial. The judge said the trial was the second biggest in the history of the province, some 100 kilometres south of the capital. The group were arrested in 1998 to 1999 and charged with offences dating back to 1992.

In recent years Vietnam has faced a mounting influx of opium and heroin from Laos, which the judge described as "white death." In the neighbouring province of Nam Dinh in June, a record 11 people were sentenced to death in a drugs trial described as the country's biggest ever, although one later had his sentenced commuted. But the authorities' widespread use of executions has come in for mounting criticism abroad -- in April the vice-president of the International Federation of the Leagues of Human Rights, Vo Van Ai, raised the issue with the United Nations Human Rights Commission.

Last year a total of 194 people were sentenced to death, 76 of them for drug offences.

Agence France Presse - October 21, 2000.