On Thursday, courts in Vietnam ordered imprisonment to two activists, as the communist-ruled government widens its crackdown on dissent. A court in Nghe An province sentenced 32-year-old Nguyen Viet Dung to seven years in prison for posting “anti-state propaganda” on his Facebook account.
The ruling Communist Party of Vietnam sustains tight media censorship and does not allow to tolerate criticism. It has been stepping up sentencing and arrests of activists and handing them longer in imprisonment.
Dung, who was jailed for a year in 2015 for causing public disorder, will also face five years of house arrest after serving his latest prison term, police said.
“These trumped up charges, used to attack peaceful activists like Nguyen Viet Dung and many other dissidents before him, show just how easy it is for the government to harass, detain, prosecute and imprison any person,” said Phil Robertson, Deputy Asia Director at New York-based Human Rights Watch, and added that, Vietnam should heed calls from the United Nations and foreign diplomats demanding the immediate and unconditional release of Dung.
Separately, a court in the nearby province of Ha Tinh on Thursday jailed Tran Thi Xuan for nine years after she was convicted of “attempting to overthrow the people’s administration”, police in the province said.
Police reported Xuan was a member of a group called the Brotherhood for Democracy, related group members were jailed at other trials this month.
Lawyers for Dung and Xuan could not be reached for comment on Thursday. Their trials offers heavy sentences for at least seven other activists convicted of attempting to overthrow the people’s administration.
This month, a Hanoi court sentenced human rights lawyer and activist Nguyen Van Dai to 15 years in prison on the grounds that he “aimed at overthrowing the people’s administration”.
Five other activists affiliated with Brotherhood Democracy were jailed for seven to 12 years. Facebook said its community standard in Vietnam was in line with that elsewhere.
“There are also times when we may have to remove or restrict access to content because it violates a law in a particular country, even though it doesn’t violate our community standards,” a Facebook spokeswoman said in a statement.
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