Tran Khai Thanh Thuy

Viet Tan has learned that writer Tran Khai Thanh Thuy and her husband, Do Ba Tan, were attacked by undercover police in Vietnam. At about 8:30pm on Thursday, October 8, 2009, two thugs stormed into their residence in Hanoi (Kham Thien ward, Dong Da district). The thugs beat the couple with bricks and threatened to stick them with AIDS-infected needles.

About an hour later (9:30pm) uniformed police entered the home and took the couple away. It is believed that they are currently being held at the public security station in Kham Thien ward in Hanoi. Their only child, a 13-year old daughter, is currently at home alone and terrified after witnessing the attack on her parents. Read the rest at Viet Tran.

Can you imagine a world where your facebook updates can put you in jail?

Can you imagine being arrested for posting a new blog entry?

Well, there is no need to imagine this. It’s happening right now in Vietnam.

As the world embraces the internet as forum for free expression and communication, Vietnam sees it otherwise. Earlier this year, the government of Vietnam requests internet companies such as Microsoft, Yahoo and Google to shut down blogs and hand over information of their users that could lead to their arrest. Read the rest of this entry…

“In response to the fast growing citizen journalist movement, the Vietnamese government launched a new entity (Administration Agency for Radio, Television and Electronics Information) and decree to restrict Internet freedom, censor private blogs, and compel information technology companies to cooperate with authorities.”

We’ve been reporting on the situation here and with VOA radio. The new agency sounds particularly menacing and a way of normalizing censorship

via Global Voices Advocacy

The blogger suppressed in Vietnam

The Committee to Protect Bloggers was featured in a Vietnamese language radio program and web article along with The Committee to Protect Journalists. You can see how Google translates it here. There are some real limits to automated translations from English to Vietnamese, it seems, but the jist is there.

‚Äî VOA News – Vi?c tr?n √°p blogger ? VN ‘ng√†y c√†ng gia t?ng s?c m?nh’.

Pham Doan Trang

We received this email today from a¬† recent site visitor: “Dear committee, Pham Doan Trang, a journalist and a blogger in Vietnam, has been arrested on August 28, 2009. Trang edits Tuan Vietnam, an online weekly that is a component of VietnamNet, the country’s most popular news website.

She also owns Trang the Ridiculous, a blog on Blogspot. Trang’s articles on Tuan Vietnam cover a number of sensitive areas, including the relationship between Vietnam and China and the dispute between the two countries over territorial claims on the South China Sea. Most of entries on her personal blog, Trang the Ridiculous, are political. In some entries, she mocks Vietnamese political figures’ speeches. In others, she criticize the Vietnamese Congress for being weak handed and the Vietnamese Government’s leadership as silly and clueless.

Please help us to publicize this information.” Read the rest of this entry…

The CNA reported yesterday that a blogger in Vietnam “who was defending the Church against the state media‚Äôs distortions of Pope Benedict XVI‚Äôs June speech to Vietnamese bishops” was arrested on Thursday. This follows another report of a Vietnamese blogger being fired from his newspaper over a personal blog in which he listed misdeeds committed by the former Soviet Union. Bui Tanh Hieu, who writes under the pen name Nguoi Buon Gio, (meaning ‚ÄúWind Trader”" was arrested in Hanoi on August 27, according to Reuters, and no one has heard from him since. The CNA article shows looks at the recent controversy taking place on the Web in Vietnam following the Pope’s address.

The turmoil surrounds an August 24 aricle by the state-run Vietnam Net, titled A good Catholic is a good citizen. The article is said to take several of the Popes statements our of context or fabricated them, suggesting that the Pope’s comments proved that “Catholic priests to overthrow the government.” Bloggers questioning this assertion have been targeted.

It’s a bad week for bloggers. News has come via RSF that Nguyen Van Hai, the Vietnamese blogger who was arrested in April, has been sentenced to two and a half years in jail.

Nguyen Van Hai, who blogs as Dieu Cay, was charged and convicted of tax fraud. A number of facts marshal against the notion that the charge was legitimate. Chief among them was the fact that Nguyen was not charged with tax fraud until five days after his arrested, as does the fact that he is a member of the democracy activism blogging group, Union of Independent Journalists.

Nguyen’s sentence comes on the heals of the equally ridiculous two-year sentence of Moroccan blogger,¬† Mohamed Erraji.