Vietnam sentences blogger to 12 years in prison for disseminating 'anti-state propaganda'

A Vietnamese court sentenced activist and blogger Duong Van Thai  to 12 years in prison after being forcibly repatriated from Thailand in 2023 for the crime of disseminating anti-state propaganda, journalism advocacy organizations reported this Friday.

“Vietnam’s harsh sentencing of blogger Duong Van Thai is grotesque and an outrage, particularly amid allegations he was kidnapped in Thailand and forcibly sent back to Vietnam for wrongful prosecution,” said Shawn Crispin, senior Southeast Asia representative for the Committee to Protect Journalists. “The real criminal in this instance is the Vietnamese state. Thai should be released immediately and allowed to leave Vietnam.” 

State charges against the activist accused Duong of “preparing, disseminating or propagating information, documents and objects with the intention of opposing the State of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam,” and were heard Wednesday in a closed door Hanoi trial, CPJ reports.

“Thai posts political commentary, critical of government policies and leaders, to his around 119,000 followers on his Tin Tuc 24H YouTube channel, which has been disabled,” CPJ reported. “He previously ran the Servant’s Tent online news platform, which reported critically on the ruling Communist Party and its top members and is a member of the banned Independent Journalists Association of Vietnam.”

A Vietnamese court yesterday sentenced the blogger Duong Van Thai to 12 years in prison on charges of publishing anti-state propaganda following a trial in Hanoi. https://t.co/1DjMjqYGxg pic.twitter.com/LLwNRlpU5u

— The Diplomat (@Diplomat_APAC) October 31, 2024

The charge of publishing propaganda against the State is frequently used by Vietnamese communist authorities to repress dissidents.

“By kidnapping Duong Van Thai, a journalist who reported on state corruption, and sentencing him to a scandalous prison sentence, the Vietnamese regime shows the extent of its contempt for press freedom,” said Cédric Alviani, director for the Asia-Pacific division of Reporters Without Borders.

The Vietnamese national disappeared on April 13 of last year while riding a motorcycle in a central province of Thailand, where he had resided since 2019 as a refugee while waiting to be sent to another country.

Two cars blocked his way and forced him to get into one of the vehicles.

Three days later, the state-controlled Vietnamese press reported the arrest of Duong as he tried to illegally enter the north of the country from Laos.

The activist had previously fled to Thailand in 2018 for fear of reprisals for his social media posts, in which he criticized Vietnamese rulers.

Thai Van Duong was recognized as a refugee by the United Nations in 2019.

This is not the first time that Vietnamese authorities have been accused of kidnapping people persecuted by the law abroad.

The most notorious case occurred in 2017, when Trinh Xuan Thanh, former head of the state company PetroVietnam, fled to Berlin after being accused of causing large losses to the State.

German government officials say the former businessman was kidnapped on German soil and forcibly taken to Vietnam, he said, according to a report published by the EFE Spanish language news service.

Although Vietnamese authorities and Thanh himself (sentenced to life imprisonment in 2018) denied the kidnapping occurred, the matter caused a diplomatic conflict between both countries, with the expulsion of a Vietnamese official from its embassy in Berlin.

Vietnam is one of the countries in the world that most strongly represses freedom of the press and expression. It currently keeps 200 people imprisoned for his activism, according to the organization The 88 Project.

According to CPJ, “Vietnam was the world’s fifth-worst jailer of journalists, with at least 19 reporters behind bars on December 1, 2023, at the time of CPJ’s latest prison census.”