Bangkok, October 31–A court in Hanoi sentenced Duong Van Thai, an independent Vietnamese blogger who went missing in Thailand and was later in Vietnamese custody in April 2023, to 12 years in prison and three years’ probation on Wednesday on charges of anti-state propaganda.
“Vietnam’s harsh sentencing of blogger Duong Van Thai is grotesque and an outrage, particularly amid allegations he was kidnapped in Thailand and forcibly sent back to Vietnam for wrongful prosecution,” said Shawn Crispin, CPJ’s senior Southeast Asia representative. “The real criminal in this instance is the Vietnamese state. Thai should be released immediately and allowed to leave Vietnam.”
Thai was convicted October 30 in a one-day, closed-door trial at the Hanoi People’s Court, of “making, storing, disseminating or propagating information, documents, and items aimed at opposing the Socialist Republic of Vietnam” under Article 117 of Vietnam’s penal code, according to multiple reports.
In 2019, Thai fled to Thailand, fearing persecution for his journalism, and was given refugee status by the United Nations refugee agency’s office in Bangkok. He was interviewing for third-country resettlement at the time of his apparent abduction and deportation to Vietnam, according to multiple reports.
Thai posts political commentary, critical of government policies and leaders, to his around 119,000 followers on his Tin Tuc 24H YouTube channel, which has been disabled. He previously ran the Servant’s Tent online news platform, which reported critically on the ruling Communist Party and its top members, and is a member of the banned Independent Journalists Association of Vietnam.
CPJ’s email to Vietnam’s Ministry of Public Security about Thai’s conviction did not immediately receive a response. Vietnam was the world’s fifth-worst jailer of journalists, with at least 19 reporters behind bars on December 1, 2023, at the time of CPJ’s latest prison census.