Vietnam bloggers face May 15 trial: lawyer

 

AFP - 04 May 2012

Three well-known Vietnamese bloggers including one whose case has been raised by US President Barack Obama are set to go on trial for "propaganda against the state" on May 15, a lawyer said on Friday.

The trio are accused of "distorting the truth, denigrating the party and state" by posting hundreds of political articles to the banned website "Free Journalists Club" of Vietnam, as well as writing on their own blogs.

Their trial date was announced on Friday by a court, according to Doan Thai Duyen Hai, a lawyer for one of the defendants.

"They will be tried under article 88 of the Criminal Code (conducting propaganda against the one-party communist state)", which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years' imprisonment, the lawyer told AFP.

Phan Thanh Hai's blog covered highly sensitive topics such as territorial disputes with China, controversial bauxite mining projects, high-level corruption scandals and trials of famous dissidents.

Hai was arrested in Ho Chi Minh City in October 2010. Police confiscated two computers and numerous documents and articles of his printed from the Internet.

A second accused, the former policewoman Ta Phong Tan, used her blog to denounce corruption and injustice in Vietnam's legal system.

The third defendant, Nguyen Van Hai, better known by his online alias Dieu Cay, was set to be released from a 30-month jail term for tax evasion in October 2010, but has been kept in detention for the new charge.

Before his arrest in 2008, he had participated in anti-Chinese protests linked to Vietnam's maritime territorial disputes with Beijing.

"We must not forget (journalists) like blogger Dieu Cay, whose 2008 arrest coincided with a mass crackdown on citizen journalism in Vietnam," Obama said Thursday in a statement to mark World Press Freedom Day.

"We call on all governments to protect the ability of journalists, bloggers, and dissidents to write and speak freely without retribution," Obama said, according to a statement emailed to AFP.

In a January report, US-based Human Rights Watch said Hanoi had "intensified its repression" of dissidents in the last year, with dozens of peaceful activists being jailed under "vaguely defined articles" of the penal code.

 

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