HANOI: A Vietnamese court on Thursday (Feb 27) sentenced a leading independent journalist to 30 months in prison over Facebook posts that criticised the government, state media said.
Huy Duc worked for influential state-run newspapers before authoring one of Vietnam’s most popular blogs and Facebook accounts, where he criticised the country’s communist leaders on issues such as corruption, media control and relations with China.
The court in Hanoi convicted the 63-year-old of “abusing democratic freedoms to infringe upon the interests of the state” through posting 13 articles on Facebook, according to Vietnam News Agency.
The trial lasted just a few hours.
“These articles have a large number of interactions, comments, and shares, causing negative impacts on social order and safety,” the indictment read, according to state media.
Shortly before his arrest last June, Huy Duc – which is the journalist’s pen name – took aim online at Vietnam’s most powerful leader To Lam, as well as his predecessor Nguyen Phu Trong.
It is unclear if the charges related to these particular posts.
Vietnam, a one-party state, has no free media and clamps down hard on any dissent. It is one of the world’s top jailers of journalists, according to the Reporters Without Borders (RSF) press freedom campaign group.
The trial in Hanoi came just months after blogger Duong Van Thai – who had almost 120,000 followers on YouTube, where he regularly recorded livestreams critical of the government – was jailed for 12 years on charges of publishing anti-state information.
In January, a prominent former lawyer was jailed for three years over Facebook posts.
