Busy end of the year in Vietnamese courts. In three separate cases, four activists were sentenced to terms ranging from six to ten years in prison. Their main point in common? Criticizing the one-party “democracy” of the Communist regime in Hanoi. This one points to 175e place (out of 180) in the Reporters Without Borders ranking on press freedom.
La journaliste Pham Doan Trang will thus spend the next nine years behind bars. The People’s Court sentenced her on December 14 for “propaganda against the state”. “Pham is very well known, both in Vietnam and abroad. With this heavy sentence, the Communist Party wanted to show that it kept control of what it is possible to say or not in the country ”, comments Giang Khac Nguyen, Vietnam specialist at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.
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The 43-year-old pro-democracy activist (Press Freedom Prize 2019) hosted the blog Law Journal, which she co-founded. She also denounced the environmental problems and land conflicts, frequent in the country of 97 million inhabitants.
It is precisely in a land grabbing case that Trinh Ba Phuong and Nguyen Thi Tam were sentenced to ten and six years in prison. The two activists were convicted of “fabricating, possessing and publishing information aimed at opposing the state”. They had supported on Facebook the fight of the farmers of Dong Tam, south of the capital. Same motive same punishment for activist Do Nam Trung, a few days later.
Cascading trials
These cascading trials, denounced in particular by the United Nations, show that the Communist government does not want to be overwhelmed by users of the American social network. With 74.1 million active accounts, Vietnam is the seventh country in the world in terms of the number of subscribers on Facebook. Since the pandemic, the platform has become a receptacle for protest against the very strict measures adopted by Hanoi. With good reason, often. Activist Phuong’s family were unable to attend his trial in December: “Covid checkpoints” blocked both ends of his street.
To fight against freedom of expression, the Vietnamese state put a first tightening in 2018, by adopting its law on cybersecurity. He also hired influencers and censors; the figure of 10,000 pro-government accounts is put forward.
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