Vietnam jails ex-lawyer over Facebook posts

A Vietnamese court jailed a prominent former lawyer for three years on Friday over Facebook posts, a ruling condemned by rights groups as a fresh attack on freedom of expression in the communist country.

Tran Dinh Trien, former deputy chair of the Hanoi Bar Association, is the latest high-profile lawyer to be targeted by authorities for what they have written online.

Rights campaigners say the government in authoritarian, one-party Vietnam have in recent years stepped up a crackdown on civil society and weaponized the law to silence critics.

The court in Hanoi convicted 65-year-old Trien on charges of "abusing democratic freedoms to infringe upon state interests", and sentenced him to three years in prison.

The court said he had written posts on his personal Facebook page containing "unauthenticated content" that "affected the reputation of the courts and the chief judge of the supreme court personally".

Trien, head of the Vi Dan "For the People" legal firm in Hanoi, was arrested in June. His legal license was suspended last week.

He has defended activists and represented clients on sensitive issues such as land confiscation.

The three Facebook posts he was charged over were uploaded in April and May last year.

In them, he criticized the chief justice of the supreme court, who he said prevented defendants' family members from attending trials, and journalists and lawyers from recording video during open trials, according to Human Rights Watch.

Elaine Pearson, HRW's Asia director, urged foreign governments to pressure Vietnam to free Trien.

"It is appalling that lawyer Tran Dinh Trien has been sentenced to three years in prison for peacefully expressing their views online -- something that shouldn't even be a crime," she told AFP.

- Controls on speech -

The state Vietnam News Agency (VNA) said Trien and his lawyers had argued that he was exercising his right to free speech in the posts, and they did not violate the law.

But the court ruled that while free speech was recognized by the Vietnamese constitution, people must not "take advantage" of this to damage state interests, VNA reported.

"The trial panel determined that Tran Dinh Trien's actions were very serious, negatively affecting security, order, and social safety," VNA said.

While Vietnam notionally allows free speech, in practice it is very tightly restricted, and Reporters Without Borders (RSF) ranks the country 74th out of 180 for press freedom, describing it as one of the world's worst jailers of journalists.

Article 331 of the penal code -- the section Trien was charged under -- was used to convict and sentence at least 24 people in 2024 alone, according to HRW.

Ben Swanton, co-director of The 88 Project, which advocates for freedom of expression in Vietnam, told AFP the sentence was "yet another example of Hanoi's new wave of repression".

Ahead of the verdict in the trial, held over a day and a half under tight security, The 88 Project called the charges against Trien a violation of international law.

Last month new rules came into force in Vietnam requiring Facebook and TikTok to verify user identities and hand over data to authorities.

Under "Decree 147", all tech giants operating in Vietnam must verify user accounts by phone numbers or Vietnamese identification numbers and store that information alongside their full name and date of birth.