A Vietnamese court yesterday sentenced a prominent independent scholar and journalist to 30 months in prison over Facebook posts that criticized the government.
Truong Huy San, better known by the pen name Huy Duc, was convicted of “abusing democratic freedoms to infringe upon the interests of the state” under Article 331 of the penal code, according to a report in state media.
The catch-all charge relates to 13 articles that the 63-year-old posted on his Facebook page, “Truong Huy San (Osin Huy Duc),” which appears to have been deactivated.
According to the indictment against him, “between 2015 and 2024, San, gathered information and documents, drafted, and posted numerous articles on his personal Facebook page… Thirteen of these articles allegedly infringed upon State interests and the rights and legitimate interests of organizations and individuals.”
It added, “The posts attracted significant interaction, comments, and shares, leading to a negative impact on national security, and social order and safety.”
The authorities did not specify the contents of these posts, although Huy Duc had written extensively about current affairs, including government corruption, environmental issues. He had also criticized top leaders including To Lam, the chief of the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV), and his predecessor Nguyen Phu Trong.
Huy Duc was arrested in June of last year and later charged under Article 331, a catch-all offense that has been used extensively against dissidents and critics of the CPV.
Huy Duc, who got his start in Vietnamese state media in the 1980s, is perhaps best known as the author of Ben Thang Cuoc (“The Winning Side”), his account of the post-war reform and renovation (doi moi). Completed partially during the year that he spent on a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University, the book was published in two volumes in 2012. In a 2018 review, the scholar Peter Zinoman described “The Winning Side” as “the best account available in any language of the history and significance of Renovation.”
“One of the most remarkable aspects of The Winning Side,” Zinoman noted, “is the extraordinary frankness of this section of the book especially given the fact that it was written by a working journalist based inside the country.”
Indeed, Huy Duc had long pushed against the boundaries of the politically permissible. In 2006, he started a blog in which he published commentary on pressing social and political issues, which the authorities shut down in 2010. Human Rights Watch noted that with more than 350,000 followers on Facebook, he had become prior to his arrest “one of the platform’s most influential Vietnamese political commentators.”
In a statement yesterday, the watchdog group Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said that it was “appalled” by the sentence and called for his immediate release. The Journal of Vietnamese Studies, which last year published a lengthy interview with Huy Duc conducted in 2013, said that the “verdict against our distinguished colleague should send a chilling message to all scholars in Vietnamese Studies.” PEN America described it as “a stark reminder that Vietnam fears the power of words.”
The fact that the Vietnamese authorities have decided to target a writer with an international profile as prominent as Huy Duc is no surprise. The CPV has in recent years made explicit efforts to ensure that Vietnam’s increasing economic openness does not bring political challenges that undermine the CPV’s monopoly on power.
In March of last year, the Project88 published a leaked Vietnamese government directive – Directive 24 – calling for further restrictions against the activities of civil society groups and increasing scrutiny of foreign organizations and Vietnamese nationals traveling abroad. The directive called on the Party to counter the influence of “hostile and reactionary forces” taking advantage of the country’s increased openness to the outside world.
Huy Duc’s sentence follows the conviction last month of the Hanoi lawyer Tran Dinh Trien, who was imprisoned for three years for Facebook posts criticizing a former chief justice under Article 331, and the jailing of the blogger Duong Van Thai after his apparent abduction in Thailand. Thai was sentenced to 12 years in prison in October on charges of publishing anti-state propaganda under Article 117 of the penal code.