Three prominent Vietnamese bloggers appeared in court Friday to appeal against their prison sentences for “anti-state propaganda”, a lawyer said, following international calls for their release.
Nguyen Van Hai, whose case has been raised by US President Barack Obama, and former policewoman Ta Phong Tan received 12 and 10 years in jail respectively at a brief trial in September. A third blogger was handed four years.
The convictions relate to political articles the bloggers posted on the banned Vietnamese website “Free Journalists Club” as well as their own blogs, which criticised corruption, injustice and Hanoi’s foreign policy.
On Friday, Hai — alias Dieu Cay — and Tan both “lodged appeals saying they were innocent,” Dieu Cay’s lawyer Ha Huy Son told AFP.
“Dieu Cay told the court this morning that he did not commit any crime,” Son said, adding that no members of the blogger’s family were present in the courtroom in southern Ho Chi Minh city.
Tan’s mother Dang Thi Kim Lieng died in July after setting herself ablaze ahead of her daughter’s trial.
Fellow blogger Phan Thanh Hai, who pleaded guilty at the September trial and received a four-year jail term, was also appealing to have his sentence reduced, Son said.
The bloggers were convicted of conducting propaganda against the one-party communist state under Article 88 of the criminal code, which rights groups say is one of many “vaguely defined articles” used to prosecute dissidents.
The convictions show “how the government’s control continues to be built on the systematic suppression of core civil and political rights”, Human Rights Watch deputy Asia director Phil Robertson said Friday.
Vietnam bans private media and all newspapers and television channels are state-run.
Reporters Without Borders ranked Vietnam 172 out of 179 countries in its 2011-2012 press freedom index and identified the authoritarian state as an “Enemy of the Internet” because of systematic use of cyber-censorship.
In May this year, US President Barack Obama said “we must not forget (journalists) like blogger Dieu Cay, whose 2008 arrest coincided with a mass crackdown on citizen journalism in Vietnam”.
Jailed Vietnam bloggers to hear appeal verdict
