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HONG KONG — Vietnam sentenced three journalists to jail on Tuesday, together with a outstanding reporter who had written for overseas information organizations and advocated press freedom within the one-party state.
The sentences are the most recent crackdown on impartial thought in a rustic the place the authorities are busy stamping out dissent forward of an necessary assembly by the ruling Communist Party later this month.
The outstanding journalist, Pham Chi Dung, was sentenced to fifteen years on expenses of creating and disseminating propaganda in opposition to the state. Mr. Dung is the founding father of the Independent Journalists Association of Vietnam, an unsanctioned group that was established seven years in the past in a rustic the place all media is state-owned and the Communist Party has constructed a big equipment to stifle dissent.
Two different journalists, Nguyen Tuong Thuy and Le Huu Minh Tuan, have been sentenced on related expenses in the identical Ho Chi Minh City court docket. They obtained 11 years every.
Critics of the federal government denounced the jail phrases. “The accused are completely innocent, and their arrest is a blatant violation of the Vietnamese Constitution and international laws,” stated Nguyen Quang A, one of many nation’s most outstanding dissidents.
Le Cong Dinh, one other dissident and a former prisoner, stated that the sentences have been “unreasonably long.”
“They are not based on evidence and behavior, but stem from panic at the prospect of people rising up to demand and exercise their freedoms,” he added.
Mr. Dung has written for well-liked dissident blogs in Vietnam, in addition to the BBC and Voice of America, a Washington-based information group that receives funding from the United States authorities.
He was arrested in late 2019 after he issued a petition urging the European Union to not ratify a free-trade settlement with Vietnam that it had signed a number of months earlier. He stated that his nation ought to first enhance its human rights report and its remedy of journalists.
The Ho Chi Minh City court docket stated that Mr. Dung had began the impartial journalists affiliation as a method of inciting folks to defame the Communist Party, native information retailers reported on Tuesday.
Mr. Dinh, the activist, disputed that narrative. “This is a man who has an unshakable belief in citizens’ right to freedom of speech,” he stated.
The three sentences have been handed down weeks earlier than Vietnam holds the most important occasion on its political calendar: The Communist Party’s nationwide congress, which meets each 5 years to pick out the nation’s high leaders.
The celebration’s basic secretary, Nguyen Phu Trong, a 76-year-old ideologue, is anticipated to retain a outstanding function within the management.
As the congress attracts nearer, the authorities have been arresting or prosecuting their loudest critics.
“The time is conducive for prospective future party leaders to demonstrate their loyalty to the socialist one-party regime by squelching pro-democracy activists to ensure a smooth run-up” to the congress, Carl Thayer, a longtime Vietnam analyst, wrote in October.
Mr. Thayer was writing a day after the police in Ho Chi Minh City arrested a outstanding journalist and activist, Pham Doan Trang. Ms. Trang was charged beneath the identical article of Vietnam’s prison code that Mr. Dung was sentenced beneath on Tuesday, and she or he faces as much as 20 years in jail.
Among different delicate strikes, Ms. Trang lately co-wrote a report that challenged the official account of a lethal police raid in a village close to the capital, Hanoi. She additionally reported on a 2016 environmental catastrophe induced when a metal manufacturing unit owned by a Taiwan firm discharged poisonous waste into the ocean alongside a stretch of Vietnam’s central coast.
In the previous, Vietnamese officers have been extra involved about how imprisoning journalists and dissidents would possibly look to the skin world. But they’ve been invigorated lately by the Trump administration, which has broadly ignored human rights abuses.
They are additionally emboldened by their nation’s growing significance as a worldwide manufacturing hub, and its function as a strategic American ally in a area the place Beijing is asserting its affect and its maritime claims within the South China Sea.
Chau Doan contributed reporting from Hanoi, Vietnam.
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