Vietnam Jails Ex-lawyer Over Facebook Posts: Court

Fahad Shabbir (@FahadShabbir) Published January 10, 2025 | 12:00 PM

Hanoi, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 10th Jan, 2025) A Vietnamese court on Friday sentenced a prominent former lawyer to three years in jail over Facebook posts it ruled undermined the state by criticising a leading judge.

Tran Dinh Trien, former deputy head 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 authorities in communist, one-party Vietnam have in recent years stepped up a crackdown on civil society and weaponised the law to silence government critics.

The court in Hanoi convicted the 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 licence was suspended last week.

Deputy chair of the Hanoi Bar Association from 2013-2018, Trien 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 criticised 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.

Vietnam has strict curbs on freedom of expression, and Reporters Without Borders (RSF) ranks it 174th out of 180 countries for press freedom, describing it as one of the world's worst jailers of journalists.