Vietnamese Dissident Writer Jailed for Five Years, Six Months by Hanoi Court
Pham Chi Thanh was charged under Article 117 of Vietnam's Penal Code, a
law frequently used by authorities to stifle dissident voices.
RFA | 2021-07-09
A court in Vietnam’s capital Hanoi on Friday sentenced a political dissident,
writer, and journalist to five years and six months in prison following a
two-and-a-half hour trial called “inappropriate and unlawful” by his lawyer.
Pham Chi Thanh, owner of a blog and Facebook page containing around 100 articles
satirizing Vietnamese political leaders, had been charged under Article 117 of
Vietnam’s Penal Code “for producing, storing, and disseminating information and
documents against the Vietnamese state.”
Article 117 is frequently used by authorities to stifle peaceful critics of the
country’s one-party communist government, and persons convicted of crimes
charged under the law can be sentenced to from five to 20 years in prison.
“Pham Chi Thanh is innocent,” said Thanh’s lawyer Ha Huy Son, speaking to RFA
after the trial. “Article 117 only covers writings against the state, and
Thanh’s writings only criticized the President, General Secretary Nguyen Phu
Trong.”
“The Investigating Agency and the Procuracy equated the president with the
state, which was entirely baseless, so this prosecution [of Thanh] was
inappropriate and unlawful,” Son said.
Son added that he had asked that the trial be postponed as both Thanh’s
accuser—the buyer of a book self-published by Thanh in 2019 criticizing
government leaders—and representatives from the Investigating Agency were not
present in the court, but his request was denied.
Born in 1952, Thanh had worked as a managing editor at the Voice of Vietnam
radio service, but was dismissed from his job in 2007 after writing articles
criticizing China.
He later joined dozens of others presenting themselves as independent candidates
for election to Vietnam’s National Assembly, a political process tightly
controlled by the ruling Communist Party.
Books, online writings
After self-publishing books and posting online writings criticizing Vietnam’s
government and leaders, he was taken into custody on May 21, 2020 by a large
group of police who burst through the door of his home and seized personal
documents, two computers, and a printer, and was later charged under Article
117.
With Vietnam’s media all following Communist Party orders, “the only sources of
independently-reported information are bloggers and independent journalists, who
are being subjected to ever-harsher forms of persecution,” the press freedoms
watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) says in its 2021 Press Freedoms Index.
Measures taken against them now include assaults by plainclothes police, RSF
said in its report, which placed Vietnam at 175 out of 180 countries surveyed
worldwide, a ranking unchanged from last year.
“To justify jailing them, the Party resorts to the criminal codes, especially
three articles under which ‘activities aimed at overthrowing the government,’
‘anti-state propaganda’ and ‘abusing the rights to freedom and democracy to
threaten the interests of the state’ are punishable by long prison terms,” the
rights group said.
Vietnam’s already low tolerance of dissent deteriorated sharply last year with a
spate of arrests of independent journalists, publishers, and Facebook
personalities as authorities continued to stifle critics in the run-up to the
ruling Communist Party Congress in January. But arrests continue in 2021.
Reported by RFA’s Vietnamese Service. Translated by Anna Vu. Written in English
by Richard Finney.
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