Nguyen Ngoc Nhu Quynh (also known as Me Nam, or Mother Mushroom) has been arrested at midday today and charged under Article 88 of the Vietnamese Penal Code, “conducting propaganda against the state.”

Her mother said Nguyen Ngoc Nhu Quynh was on the way to visit Nguyen Huu Quoc Duy, a young blogger now serving a three-year-imprisonment sentence, also under Article 88. The police there pushed Quynh into a car, handcuffing her and taking her back home for a house search from 11.30 a.m.

What they found at her house were several placards demanding the authorities to take the Taiwanese Formosa steel company to court.

After a few hours of house searching, they took Quynh to jail, charging her with “conducting propaganda against the state.”

Formosa is the Taiwanese corporation that discharged toxic waste water into the sea in Vietnam’s central region, causing the dreadful environmental disaster in April when hundreds of tonnes of fish were killed.

Nguyen Ngoc Nhu Quynh, 37, is a famous blogger in Vietnam, founder and member of the Vietnamese Bloggers’ Network. Last year she was the first Asian to receive the “Civil Rights Defender of the Year” award from the Sweden-based Civil Rights Defender.