Minh-Hoang Pham is an exiled Vietnamese mathematics professor, writer and human rights activist.
After returning to Vietnam from France in the early 2000s, Pham began writing a blog critical of the Vietnamese communist regime under the pseudonym Phan Kien Quoc. He also offered his students at Ho Chi Minh City University additional teaching in effective activism. This work, in addition to his membership of Vietnamese pro-democracy party Viet Tan, led to his unjust arrest in August 2010.
After spending a year in pretrial detention, Pham was finally sentenced to three years behind bars and a further three years under house arrest. Though his time in prison was later commuted to 17 months, his period under house arrest was not reduced. Pham won a Hellman-Hammett Grant for writers at risk while imprisoned.
Having served his sentence, Pham was again arrested in 2016 for organising an open exchange of ideas on the topic of Vietnam’s constitution. In 2017 Vietnam’s President revoked his Vietnamese nationality without explanation, surrounded his house with police, and deported him to France without the chance to even bid farewell to his wife. Pham was nominated for the Reporters Without Borders Prize for Press Freedom the same year.
