A prominent Vietnamese freelance journalist and author was given a 30-month prison sentence for Facebook postings that were critical of the government.
In a trial that took only a few hours, a Hanoi court found 63-year-old Huy Duc guilty of “abusing democratic freedoms to infringe on the interests of the state.” The court found him guilty for 13 articles he had published on Facebook that, the indictment claimed, had garnered many interactions, comments, and shares, and had ultimately had negative impacts on social order and safety, the Vietnam News Agency reported.
Huy Duc, whose actual name is Truong Huy San, had written for influential state-run newspapers before establishing one of Vietnam’s most popular blogs and social networking websites. His writings regularly criticized the country’s communist leadership on various issues, including corruption and censorship of the media to Vietnam’s relations with China.
A former senior army lieutenant, Huy Duc faced professional repercussions in 2009 when he was dismissed from a state news organization for speaking out against Vietnam’s historical ties to the Soviet Union. He later spent a year at Harvard University as a Nieman Fellow, during which time he penned The Winning Side, a reflective memoir of life in post-Vietnam War Vietnam.
This is a disturbing trend in Vietnam, with the government’s reaction to dissent being severe punishment. Just a few months previously, blogger Duong Van Thai had been given 12 years for publishing anti-state news, and in January, a former lawyer was sentenced to three years for Facebook postings of a similar kind.
Just before his arrest last June, Huy Duc had spoken out against Vietnam’s newly dominant leader, To Lam, and his predecessor, Nguyen Phu Trong. The precise connection between those remarks and the charges remains unclear.
As a one-party state, Vietnam strictly controls the media and suppresses dissent, and is among the world’s leading jailers of journalists, according to the Reporters Without Borders (RSF). The organization had previously identified Huy Duc’s articles as valuable sources of information for the Vietnamese people, providing a window to information censored by the Hanoi regime.
More generally, rights organizations say the Vietnamese government has tightened its grip on civil society in recent years. In December, new regulations took effect that force social media platforms like Facebook and TikTok to verify users and hand over data to the government. Technology companies based in Vietnam, under “Decree 147,” are required to verify user accounts on their platforms using phone numbers or Vietnamese identification numbers, then store this data along with the users’ full names and dates of birth.
