NewsLê Trong Hung, a Vietnamese journalist who often covered corruption for the independent social media TV news channel he helped to found, was sentenced today to five years in prison on a charge of “anti-state propaganda.” Reporters Without Borders (RSF) demands his immediate release and insists that his conviction is overturned. (Full Story)

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) condemns citizen-journalist Nguyen Van Dai's arbitrary arrest, just ten days after he was beaten up by plainclothes policemen, and calls on the Vietnamese authorities to stop harassing the country's citizen-journalists. In the latest chapter of the never-ending persecution of Nguyen Van Dai, the Public Security Ministry arrested him on 16 December on a charge of “propaganda against the State of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam” under article 88 of the criminal (...) (Full Story)

Reporters Without Borders has written to US secretary of state John Kerry before his official visit to Hanoi for the 20th anniversary of the resumption of diplomatic relations between the United States and Vietnam. The letter asks him to press the Vietnamese government to free all imprisoned journalists and bloggers and to stop hounding and attacking news and information providers. US Secretary of State John Kerry Department of State 2201 C Street NW Washington DC 20520 USA (...) (Full Story)

Reporters Without Borders urges the police to stop harassing the independent journalist Pham Chi Dung and his family, whose Ho Chi Minh City home was surrounded today by police officers. The authorities have gone out of their way to gag independent journalists and bloggers today, which the Communist Party is celebrating as the 40th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War and its victory over the United States. One by one, citizen-journalists and bloggers have been placed under close (...) (Full Story)

Reporters Without Borders condemns the 15-month jail sentence that a Hanoi court passed today on the dissident blogger Pham Viet Dao for “creating a bad image of the Communist Party and the government” in a total of 91 blog posts. “This latest conviction shows that government is going all-out in its persecution of news providers,” said Benjamin Ismaïl, the head of the Reporters Without Borders Asia-Pacific Desk. “We call for Dao's immediate release as he was convicted just for wanting to inform (...) (Full Story)

Reporters Without Borders is shocked by the violence that plainclothes police officers used today against bloggers and activists in the southern province of Dong Thap. Eight people – including the blogger Bui Thi Min Hang, the netizen Luu Trong Kiet and two former political prisoners – were arrested as they headed to the home of Nguyen Bac Truyen, a lawyer who had just been arrested arbitrarily. “We are appalled by the continuing persecution of independent news and information providers, (...) (Full Story)

Reporters Without Borders participated in a series of meetings and conferences on Vietnam on 3 and 4 February ahead of Vietnam's Universal Periodic Review (an examination of its human rights performance) by the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva. “Together with other groups, we evaluated the human rights situation in Vietnam, including freedom of expression and information, and shared our recommendations, which are, above all, the immediate and unconditional release of all (...) (Full Story)

The political police have been arresting and mistreating bloggers in Vietnam in recent days, both before and after an 8 December ceremony in Paris at which the Vietnam Human Rights Network and the France-Vietnam Solidarity Association paid tribute to Vietnamese bloggers. Three activists in the fight for freedom, human rights and democracy – Le Quoc Quan, a human rights lawyer, Tran Huynh Duy Thuc, a blogger who heads Research for Democracy, and Nguyen Hoang Quoc Hung, a blogger who defends (...) (Full Story)

Vietnam's President Truong Tan Sang, who is to meet with US President Barack Obama tomorrow, heads a country that is second only to China in the number of bloggers and netizens it is currently detaining – 35. Serving long sentences of up to 13 years in prison on trumped-up charges, they are the victims of his government's determined persecution of dissident voices. Reporters Without Borders has just launched a petition for the immediate and unconditional release of all these bloggers. (...) (Full Story)

Reporters Without Borders condemns Vietnamese cyber-dissident Vu Quang Thuan's deportation by Malaysia and his arrest by the Vietnamese authorities on arrival at Ho Chi Minh City airport on 2 February. He is now facing a possible 20-year jail sentence of a charge of anti-state propaganda. No date has been set for his trial. Aged 44 and a leader of the Vietnam Progressive Democratic Movement, an opposition party founded in 2007, Thuan fled in 2009 to Malaysia, where he continued to post (...) (Full Story)