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Vietnam detains 33 citizen journalists in 4 years: Report

Vietnam has detained at least 33 citizen journalists in the last four years as the government has intensified online censorship and controls, adopted new restrictive legislation and subjected Internet users to arrest, harassment and imprisonment, rights groups claim

Alexander Hamer (The Jakarta Post)
Jakarta
Wed, February 13, 2013

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Vietnam detains 33 citizen journalists in 4 years: Report

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ietnam has detained at least 33 citizen journalists in the last four years as the government has intensified online censorship and controls, adopted new restrictive legislation and subjected Internet users to arrest, harassment and imprisonment, rights groups claim.

The International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) and its member organization, the Vietnam Committee on Human Rights (VCHR), have documented over the years a significant number of cases of violations of the right to freedom of expression or opinion in Vietnam.

The France-based human rights groups expose the Vietnamese government’s ongoing efforts to clamp down on free expression in “Bloggers and Netizens Behind Bars”, released today.

“Over the past 18 months, there have been a series of trials with very heavy sentences handed down to bloggers and Internet users who have done nothing other than express their hopes for more freedom and democracy in Vietnam. This cannot go on,” says one of the report’s authors and vice president of the VCHR, Penelope Faulkner.

“We believe Vietnam is an important example, because it is a country whose impressive economic development has obscured its government’s abysmal human rights abuses.”

Citizens who criticise the government can be imprisoned under three different laws designed to limit “subversion” and keep “public order”. Article 79 of the Vietnamese penal code, dealing with subversion, carries the death penalty as maximum punishment.

The sentences listed in the various articles range from suspended sentences and house arrest to death, so they rely heavily on the discretion of the sentencing judge.

There are also cases where the accused have not faced trial at all. Engineer and pro-democracy activist Nguyen Trung Linh’s case is detailed in the report. He was arrested in October 2011 after calling for multi-party democracy and has not been seen since.

The overzealous use of these laws is evident in the arrest of a 20 year-old university student for writing anti-Chinese leaflets and poetry in October 2012. At first, the police denied they had taken Nguyen Phuong Uyên into custody, but after pressure from influential members of Vietnamese society they revealed after three days that she had been charged with producing ‘anti-state propaganda’. She has not been sentenced yet, but this charge carries a sentence of anything from three to 20 years.

Government aggression is common, say the editors of popular Vietnamese news site DanLamBao. Speaking to The Jakarta Post via email, they say while they have not been arrested, their site has been attacked numerous times by the Vietnamese government.

“For the past two years, the government has attacked the blog many times using denial-of-service attacks.”

Vietnam has been a party to the UN’s International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights since 1982, but continues to breach Article 19, which protects freedom of speech on and off the Internet.

Vietnam has one of the fastest growing Internet populations in Asia. Today, over 31 million people use the Internet — more than one third of the population — compared with 2 million in 2000. Internet penetration is especially high among young people, reaching up to 95 percent of those aged 15-22 in large cities such as Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City.

Social networks are also widely popular, and 80 percent of young Vietnamese have at least one social network account.

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http://www.fidh.org/Bloggers-and-Netizens-Behind-Bars-12866

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