Numbers in jail revealed as 20,000 look set for amnesty HANOI - Vietnam has more than 70,000 convicts in its prison system, it was reported yesterday. The number of prisoners has until now been considered a state secret by the country's communist rulers. A meeting of the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) concluded as many as 20,000 prisoners, or more than 28 per cent of the total, may be eligible for amnesty this year, a newspaper report said. They will be released to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the liberation of Saigon and the end of the Vietnam War on April 30, and Vietnam's National Day on September 2. "Our greatest concern now after this grand amnesty . . . [is that] there are still 50,000 other prisoners who remain in detention or in prisons," the newspaper quoted Do Nam, the director of MPS Department for management of prisons and re-education camps, as telling the meeting. Hanoi recently rejected the notion that the main purpose of the amnesty was to ease massive overcrowding in the country's jails. "We give the amnesty out of the humanitarian nature of the party and state and the nation and not under any pressure," MPS Deputy Minister Nguyen Van Tinh said. The official figure of 70,000 prisoners does not include people that authorities have placed in administrative detention or under house arrest, a number that sources have described as "significant". Deutsche Presse Agentur - March 8, 2000.