HANOI, Vietnam - Two international human rights groups have criticized Vietnam's use of closed trials to convict 14 members of ethnic minority groups accused of organizing anti-government protests early this year.
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch said it was likely the defendants were denied fair treatment in the one-day trials.
``The speed of the trials and the fact that the public had no advance notice gives real cause for concern that the defendants were denied basic protections, such as the right to legal counsel,'' Joe Saunders, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement.
``We are concerned these men were deprived of their fundamental right to a fair trial,'' he said.
In February, thousands of minority villagers known as Montagnards protested in Vietnam's Central Highlands over encroachment of their traditional lands, discrimination and religious restrictions.
Vietnam'sCommunist government quickly suppressed the protests, and hundreds of villagers fled into neighboring Cambodia.
On Wednesday, courts in Gai Lai and Daklak provinces sentenced the 14 men to six to 12 years in prison. The men were the first to be tried in connection with the protests, and the trials were not disclosed until after the verdicts were issued.
The defendants were charged with undermining public security and accused of having formed a ``reactionary organization'' which planned to establish an independent state, the official Vietnam News Agency said.
``The right to a public hearing is one of the fundamental tenets of a fair trial,'' Demelza Stubbings, Southeast Asia researcher for Amnesty International, said in the statement, received in Hanoi on Saturday. ``These trials may well represent another effort by the Vietnamese government to stifle freedom of expression, assembly and association among Vietnam's dissenting highland population.''
Land traditionally used by minority groups in the Central Highlands has been taken by an influx of majority Vietnamese and ethnic minorities from other parts of Vietnam. The government also bans the Protestant religion followed by many of the minority villagers.
Vietnam insists that religious rights are guaranteed under its constitution. However, the government allows only seven religious groups, which are under the effective control of the Communist Party.