Vietnam court jails journalist Huy Duc for 30 months over Facebook posts

A prominent Vietnamese author and independent journalist was given a 30-month jail term for their Facebook posts criticizing the government.

A court in the capital Hanoi found guilty 63-year-old Huy Duc of “abusing democratic freedoms to infringe on the interests of the state” by publishing 13 articles on Facebook after the trial, which only lasted for a short while.

“These articles have a large number of interactions, comments and shares, causing negative impacts on social order and safety”, the indictment quoted by Vietnam News Agency read.

Huy Duc worked for influential state-run newspapers before authoring one of Vietnam’s most popular blogs and Facebook accounts, where he criticised the country’s communist leaders on issues such as corruption, media control and relations with China.

Huy Duc, whose real name is Truong Huy San, &nbsp, is a former senior army lieutenant.

He was fired from a state news outlet in 2009 for criticising past actions by Vietnam’s former communist ally, the Soviet Union.

In 2012, Huy Duc spent a year at Harvard University on a Nieman Fellowship.

During his time abroad, his account of life in Vietnam after the end of the war with the United States, The Winning Side, was published.

His conviction comes a few months after blogger Duong Van Thai was convicted of publishing anti-state information and sentenced to a year in prison.

He regularly recorded livestreams criticizing the government on YouTube, which he had almost 120, 000 subscribers.

A well-known former attorney was also sentenced to three years in prison in January for his Facebook posts.

Huy Duc and his predecessor Nguyen Phu Trong were both targeted online shortly before his arrest in June. It’s not clear whether the allegations involved these specific posts.

Vietnam, a one-party state, has no free media and clamps down hard on any dissent. It is one of the world’s top jailers of journalists, according to the Reporters Without Borders (RSF) press freedom campaign group.

RSF claimed in a previous article that his articles were “a priceless resource of information that gave the Vietnamese people access to censored information by the Hanoi regime.”

According to rights activists, the government’s crackdown on civil society has increased recently.

Vietnam passed new online regulations in December mandating the submission of user data to authorities through Facebook and TikTok.

All tech companies operating in Vietnam are required to use Vietnamese identification numbers or phone numbers to verify user accounts under “Decree 147” and store that information along with their full names and birthdate.