A court docket in Vietnam sentenced one of many nation’s most influential journalists to 2 and a half years in jail Thursday for “abusing democratic freedoms” with a few dozen posts on Fb that criticized or questioned the federal government.
The journalist, Truong Huy San — recognized to many by his pen identify, Huy Duc — was arrested in Hanoi, the capital, in June.
He was convicted beneath the prison code for 13 articles he posted on his private Fb web page between 2015 and 2024 that, based on state-run media, “negatively impacted state pursuits, in addition to the authorized rights of organizations and people.”
Mr. San’s household was not allowed into the courtroom.
Mr. San’s case has been carefully watched by worldwide human rights teams and journalists, partly to higher perceive the path of a rising regional energy and one-party state that has usually signaled it desires to be seen as extra open to the world and innovation — whereas continuously cracking down on speech and civil society organizations.
At the very least one of many posts from Mr. San that led to the costs concerned arguments in opposition to heavy-handed policing. A screenshot of a deleted submit from Mr. San final 12 months that was preserved by the 88 Undertaking, a U.S.-based nonprofit that focuses on human rights points in Vietnam, declared: “A COUNTRY CANNOT DEVELOP BASED ON FEAR.”
By that time, his Fb web page had round 370,000 followers.
Shawn Crispin, the senior Southeast Asia consultant for the Committee to Defend Journalists, mentioned Mr. San “was convicted and sentenced for gathering and publishing impartial information, which Vietnam treats as a prison offense.”
“San and all impartial journalists wrongfully held behind bars in Vietnam must be freed instantly and unconditionally,” Mr. Crispin mentioned.
Vietnam at the moment has at the least 16 reporters in custody, based on CPJ’s newest international jail census — lots of them held for posting on social media, which the federal government has tried to strictly regulate. Vietnam is the seventh worst jailer of journalists worldwide, primarily based on the CPJ tally, tied with Iran and Eritrea.
In accordance with state media, Mr. San, 63, instructed the authorities he didn’t intend to oppose the Communist Celebration or the state, however admitted that some content material infringed upon the state’s pursuits “for which he mentioned he was ‘very sorry.’”
Mr. San grew up in a staunch revolutionary household, on a state-run collective farm in central Vietnam, the place he has mentioned he excelled extra at math than at literature.
In tenth grade, he volunteered for the Vietnamese military, calling in strikes with an artillery unit throughout a brutal border battle with China that started in 1979.
Later, as a navy journalist, he went on to cowl Vietnam’s battle in opposition to the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.
Beginning within the late ’80s, he was referred to as a corruption-busting investigative reporter for Ho Chi Minh Metropolis’s common newspaper, Tuoi Tre, the place he usually broke information with assist from his navy connections. His reporting continuously challenged Vietnam’s political tradition throughout a interval of fierce inside coverage debates between conservatives and reformists.
There was extra openness to diverging voices then, he later mentioned, and in 2005, he left Vietnam to check on the College of Maryland on a Hubert H. Humphrey Fellowship, which connects folks addressing essential international challenges.
When he returned to Vietnam in 2006, he began a weblog that turned common for its social and political commentaries. The Vietnamese authorities shut it down in 2010.
His achievements additionally included a 12 months at Harvard College on a Nieman Fellowship in 2012. Whereas there, he completed writing a two-volume ebook, “The Successful Facet,” a journalistic tour de drive that rapidly turned the definitive account of Vietnamese historical past and politics from across the finish of the battle in 1975 by means of the ’90s.
Formally, the ebook is banned in Vietnam. Nevertheless it has additionally been broadly learn, on-line and in onerous copies handed amongst associates. Mr. San has mentioned that he was merely hoping the ebook, as together with his different writing, would offer an sincere account of the nation’s complicated dynamics.
“All it does is attempt to relate what occurred after 1975 and to clarify why it occurred the way in which that it did,” Mr. San mentioned in an interview in 2013. “That’s all. I strive to not accuse anybody of something.”
Lately, he had moved his commentary to Fb. A lot of his associates, in posts there this week, expressed gratitude that his sentence was not longer. Some promised to brew the most effective selfmade liquor attainable to have a good time when he’s launched.