Senior Lecturer Allen Weiner is quoted in this Bloomberg article on what could have lead the government of Vietnam to release a prominent Vietnamese blogger from jail, where he was imprisoned for spreading anti-government propoganda. 

Prominent Vietnamese blogger Nguyen Van Hai traveled to the U.S. after being released from jail, where he was serving a 12-year term for spreading anti-government propaganda.

Hai, who was convicted in 2012 and who is known as Dieu Cay, flew to the U.S. without assistance, according to the U.S. State Department. His release comes as the U.S., critical of the Communist government’s arrest and imprisonment of “prisoners of conscience,” forges closer ties with Hanoi amid territorial tensions between Vietnam and China.

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Whether Vietnam’s decision to allow Hai to travel to the U.S. is linked to the closer country ties is unclear, said Weiner, who in 2012 filed a petition with the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention in Geneva on behalf of 16 people detained in Vietnam, five of whom have been released.

“I don’t know what motivated the government of Vietnam to do this,” he said. “I would hate for us to be in a situation where we have the kind of arrangement that we have with other countries in which you have a symbolic gesture every time the Americans come to town.”

“The party has become very anxious about anything it sees as a potential challenge to its authority,” said Allen Weiner, director of the Stanford Program in International and Comparative Law. “We have seen over the past few years the situation is going in the wrong direction.”