Vietnam: New Law Threatens Right to a Defense
Revised Penal Code Requires Lawyers Report on Clients, Penalizes Free Speech
Human Rights Watch
June 22, 2017
New York – Vietnam should
immediately repeal a provision in its revised penal code that would hold lawyers
criminally responsible for not reporting clients to the authorities for a number
of crimes, Human Rights Watch said today. The revised code also contains a
number of changes heightening criminal penalties against criticism of the
government or Vietnam’s one-party state.
“Requiring lawyers to violate lawyer-client confidentiality will mean that
lawyers become agents of the state and clients won’t have any reason to trust
their lawyers,” said Brad
Adams, Asia director at Human Rights
Watch. “Vietnam considers any criticism or opposition to the government or
Communist Party to be a ‘national security’ matter – this will undermine any
possibility of real legal defense in such cases.”
On June 20, 2017, the Vietnamese National Assembly passed a revised penal
code that will come into effect on
January 1, 2018. Article 19, section 3 of the revised penal code states that,
“[When] the person who does not report [on people] is a defender, he/she is not
held criminally accountable in accordance with clause 1 of this article, except
for not reporting on national security crimes or other especially serious crimes
which the person he/she is defending is preparing to carry out, is carrying out,
or has carried out and the defender clearly knows about it while carrying out
his/her defense duty.”
Many Vietnamese lawyers publicly voiced their concerns about this new
requirement. On June 12, the Ho Chi Minh City Bar Association submitted a letter
to the National Assembly urging it to drop the clause. According to the letter,
the new clause conflicts with the revised Criminal Procedure Code and the Law on
Lawyers, which requires legal defenders to keep information about their cases
confidential. The letter states that this new clause is “a step back from the
1999 Penal Code.”
“Vietnam’s foreign investors and trading partners should be very concerned
about laws that would require their lawyers to pass on confidential information
to the authorities to avoid getting into trouble,” Adams said.
Of particular concern is that article 19 targets people accused of vaguely
defined national security crimes, including “activities aiming to overthrow the
people’s administration” (article 79), “undermining national unity policy”
(article 87), “conducting propaganda against the State of the Socialist Republic
of Vietnam” (article 88) and “disrupting security” (article 89). Instead of
repealing such laws that are often used to punish the exercise of freedom of
association, assembly and speech, the government has now added even harsher
punishments for bloggers and rights activists. Among these are new clauses in
article 109 (previously article 79), and article 117 (previously article 88) to
the effect that whoever “takes actions in preparation of committing this crime
shall be subject to between one and five years of imprisonment.” This means that
one can be imprisoned up to five years for preparing to criticize the state or
preparing to join an independent political group disapproved by the government. A
number of vaguely-worded articles related to national security crimes are often
used to prosecute people for exercising basic rights, and now they can be (mis)used
in even more circumstances. Vietnam ought to have repealed and reformed these
laws, not made them of wider application.
In most politically-motivated arrests and convictions in Vietnam, the
authorities use article 79 to punish people for being affiliated with a
particular group or organization disapproved by the ruling communist party.
Article 87 is often used to punish people for participating in religious groups
not sanctioned by the state. Article 88 is a tool to gag dissidents and bloggers
critical of the party or the government. Article 89 is used to punish
independent labor activists who help organize wildcat strikes.
“The revised penal code illustrates Vietnam’s lack of commitment to improve
its abysmal human rights record,” said Adams. “If Vietnam sincerely wants to
promote the rule of law, it should facilitate the work of lawyers instead of
introducing new laws to make it impossible to do their jobs.”
“No Country for Human Rights Activists: Assaults on Bloggers and Democracy
Campaigners in Vietnam” is available at
https://www.hrw.org/node/304948/
For more Human Rights Watch reporting on Vietnam, please visit:
https://www.hrw.org/asia/vietnam
For more information, please contact:
In San Francisco, Brad Adams (English): +1-347-463-3531 (mobile); or adamsb@hrw.org.
Twitter: @BradMAdams
In Washington, DC, John Sifton (English): +1-646-479-2499 (mobile); or siftonj@hrw.org.
Twitter: @johnsifton
In Bangkok, Phil Robertson (English, Thai): +66-85-060-8406; or robertp@hrw.org.
Twitter: @Reaproy