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(New York) Vietnamese Authorities should immediately release prominent journalist, blogger, and author Huy Duc and drop all charges against him, Human Rights Watch said today.On June 1, 2024, Hanoi police detained Huy Duc, who uses the pen name Truong Huy San, and charged him with “abusing democratic and freedom rights to infringe upon state interests” under Article 331 of the Criminal Code, an overly broad law that authorities often use against government critics.
Authorities waited seven days to notify Huy Duc’s family of his arrest and detention, effectively forcing his disappearance and raising concerns for his safety. Neither his lawyers nor his family have been allowed to see him since he was detained.
“Vietnamese authorities have wrongly arrested Huy Duc, targeting one of Vietnam’s most courageous and influential journalists,” Patricia GoldsmanDeputy Director of the Asia Division at Human Rights Watch. “International donors and Vietnam’s trading partners should condemn Huy Duc’s arrest as a blatant violation of free expression and press for his immediate release.”
Huy Duc was born in 1962 in Ha Tinh Province in north-central Vietnam. He joined the army at age 18 and served in Vietnamese-occupied Cambodia in the mid-1980s. In 1988, during a rare period of post-war reform in Vietnam, when the Communist media was undergoing unprecedented liberalization, he joined the Youth Daily Bao Tuoi Tre worked in Ho Chi Minh City, where he became known as a dedicated journalist covering the country’s politics. Years later, while writing for a newspaper Saigon Marketing (Sai Gon Tiep Thi), Huy Duc broke Major corruption scandal Backroom deals and clandestine land purchases involving members of the prime minister’s family.
As his journalism began to attract international attention, Huy Duc received a Hubert H. Humphrey Scholarship to study at the University of Maryland. After returning to Vietnam in 2006, Huy Duc founded a popular blog, where he continued to publish editorial commentary on pressing social and political issues. Vietnamese authorities shut down the blog in 2010. In 2012, Huy Duc spent a year at Harvard University on a Nieman Fellowship, during which time he wrote his most influential work, a journalism account of the postwar era in Vietnam titled The winning side Ben Thang Cuoc, widely considered the most important nonfiction book on postwar Vietnamese history and politics, has never been publicly sold in Vietnam.
Since 2020, Huy Duc has continued to write about a range of social and political issues in Vietnam, including environmental problems such as deforestation. With more than 350,000 Facebook followers, Huy Duc remains one of the most influential Vietnamese political commentators on the platform. His most recent Facebook post before his arrest warned of the myriad dangers posed by the concentration of power in Vietnam’s notoriously authoritarian Ministry of Public Security, which was once led by Vietnam’s new president, To Lin.
Authorities arrested Huy Duc shortly after he published another recent Facebook post criticizing the shortcomings of the official anti-corruption campaign led by the Communist Party leadership. His Facebook page was also deleted and is no longer accessible on the internet.
exist Recent monthsSince then, Vietnamese authorities have stepped up their crackdown on critics, detaining nearly all prominent human rights activists as well as journalists, environmental activists and others who have criticized the government or called for reforms.
“The arrest of a journalist for critical reporting shows that the Vietnamese government is moving further away from democracy and the rule of law,” Gosman said. “Punishing Huy Duc for denouncing abuses of state power and corruption should be a cause for concern for those who expect Vietnam to undertake economic and political reforms in the near future.”
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