On 2 September, the Vietnamese government granted amnesty to 10,000 detainees, including blogger Nguyen Van Tinh and poet Tran Duch Thach, in celebration of the nation’s 66th anniversary of independence. The pair were convicted of “propaganda against the socialist state” for hanging pro-democracy banners in Haiphong in October 2009. Tinh was handed a three and a half year sentence for the crime, while Thach was sentenced to three years.