On June 9, Houston native William Nguyen was excited to be vacationing with family in Vietnam, his mother’s home country. A graduate of Yale University and the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore, Nguyen, now 33, is well-versed in Vietnamese social and political struggles, and was looking forward to taking part in peaceful demonstrations the following day.

That evening, on his Twitter account, he wrote: "I can't stress how enormous of an achievement this is for the #Vietnamese people. The communist government is allowing people to assemble peacefully and the people are exercising their civic duty to protest injustice. #Vietnam #Phandoidackhu."

The next day, Nguyen and thousands of other demonstrators, assembled on the streets of Ho Chi Minh City to march against the government’s planned “special economic zones” that would lease land to foreign investors for up to 99 years and are seen by many as a threat to Vietnamese sovereignty.

Even more importantly for Nguyen, an outspoken proponent of universal human rights, the demonstrators were also marching against a draconian new cybersecurity law that Human Rights Watch says "squarely targets free expression and access to information" and will "provide yet one more weapon for the government against dissenting voices" when it takes effect in January.

Sadly, what was intended to be a peaceful protest was undermined by plainclothes policemen and hired thugs who lashed out at the marchers. Nguyen was among the many demonstrators beaten bloody that day — some with clubs and truncheons — and dragged off to jail to face interrogations.

But unlike the others arrested that day, Nguyen is an American citizen, and it wasn’t long before his beating and arrest became an international incident.

Astonishingly, there was video footage of a bloodied Nguyen being kicked and beaten by what appear to be plainclothes police before being dragged by his arms and legs into the back of a police pickup truck.

Days passed before his family knew where he was and what crime, if any, he had been charged with. Nguyen was eventually charged with “disrupting public order,” a crime for which he soon apologized on state-controlled Vietnamese television after days of interrogation.

At the time, Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch, released a statement saying his organization was “very concerned that Nguyen’s public statement violated his due process rights and may have been coerced.” Televised “confessions” of this kind, Robertson said, “are a shameful tactic used by oppressive governments to intimidate critical voices into silence and flaunt their disregard for fundamental rights.”

We now know that for 40 days Nguyen was held in Vietnam's infamous Chi Hoa Prison, known for its squalid conditions. His initial two-day interrogation, he later told Time magazine, "was a seven-hour rotation of angry men screaming." His arms and feet shackled to a metal bar, he was only freed to eat or use the latrine.

Knowing he was facing up to seven years in prison, Nguyen’s family, friends, Yale alumni, the close-knit Vietnamese-American community here in Texas and our elected representatives in the state and Washington pressured the Communist leaders of Vietnam to release Nguyen as soon as possible.

Those efforts paid off, and, on July 20, after being found guilty in a closed court, Nguyen was fined and deported from Vietnam. Yet even though he was free, his thoughts remained with his fellow protesters and others unjustly imprisoned in Vietnam for daring to challenge the status quo.

On Twitter, shortly after his release, he expressed his commitment to helping the many Vietnamese activists still behind bars. “Imprisonment without charges, without any kind of release date is an immense form of coercion,” he wrote on July 27. “I will never regret helping the Vietnamese people exercise #democracy . . . and I will continue to help #Vietnam develop for the rest of my life.”

But it was on his first trip home to Houston after his captivity that he was most eloquent about his wish for his mother’s home country and the Vietnamese people. “The Vietnamese government is actively moving to quash dissent and keep people in the dark,” Nguyen said during an Aug. 3 press conference. He vowed to “pay it forward” by helping those still unjustly imprisoned. “I was able to escape... Others in Vietnam are not so lucky. I’ll be devoting my foreseeable future to writing in all forms and to freeing local Vietnamese dissidents who don’t have the shield of American citizenship to protect them.”

He’s currently working on a book documenting his imprisonment and the wider struggle for greater political freedom in Vietnam and other authoritarian countries. For his dogged commitment to democracy, universal human rights, and freedom of expression, William Nguyen is a finalist for Texan of the Year.

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