{"id":15545,"date":"2025-01-10T12:13:04","date_gmt":"2025-01-10T06:28:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nepalsamaj.com\/en\/?p=15545"},"modified":"2025-01-10T12:13:04","modified_gmt":"2025-01-10T06:28:04","slug":"vietnam-jails-ex-lawyer-over-facebook-posts-court","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nepalsamaj.com\/en\/vietnam-jails-ex-lawyer-over-facebook-posts-court\/","title":{"rendered":"Vietnam jails ex-lawyer over Facebook posts: court"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px;\" class=\"sharethis-inline-share-buttons\" ><\/div><p>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.<br \/>\nTran 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.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>The court in Hanoi convicted the 65-year-old Trien on charges of &#8220;abusing democratic freedoms to infringe upon state interests&#8221; and sentenced him to three years in prison.<br \/>\nThe court said he had written posts on his personal Facebook page containing &#8220;unauthenticated content&#8221; that &#8220;affected the reputation of the courts and the chief judge of the supreme court personally&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>Trien, head of the Vi Dan &#8220;For the People&#8221; legal firm in Hanoi, was arrested in June. His legal licence was suspended last week.<\/p>\n<p>Deputy chair of the Hanoi Bar Association from 2013-2018, Trien has defended activists and represented clients on sensitive issues such as land confiscation.<\/p>\n<p>The three Facebook posts he was charged over were uploaded in April and May last year.<br \/>\nIn them, he criticised the chief justice of the supreme court, who he said prevented defendants&#8217; family members from attending trials and journalists and lawyers from recording video during open trials, according to Human Rights Watch.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;s worst jailers of journalists.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15546,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15545","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nepalsamaj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15545"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nepalsamaj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nepalsamaj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nepalsamaj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nepalsamaj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15545"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nepalsamaj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15545\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15547,"href":"https:\/\/nepalsamaj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15545\/revisions\/15547"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nepalsamaj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15546"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nepalsamaj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nepalsamaj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nepalsamaj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}