Imprisoned Vietnamese journalist garlanded by press freedom group – The Diplomat
Beat ASEAN | Company | South East Asia
Pham Doan Trang is currently serving a nine-year prison sentence for “propaganda against the state”.
Imprisoned Vietnamese journalist Pham Doan Trang has received yet another accolade, being named last week as one of the winners of the International Press Freedom Award by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), an advocacy group for freedom of the press based in the United States.
CPJ named Trang as one of four winners in a July 14 statement, along with Niyaz Abdullah of Iraqi Kurdistan, Abraham Jiménez Enoa of Cuba, and Sevgil Musaieva of Ukraine. The organization said all four have “withstood immense challenges, including government repression, assault and imprisonment to get the public to report independently amid widespread misinformation and endemic war”.
Trang was arrested in Ho Chi Minh City in October 2020 and later charged under Article 117 of Vietnam’s criminal code for making “propaganda against the state”. In December last year, she was found guilty and sentenced to nine years in prison, with the sentencing judge arguing that her work was “dangerous to society” and had been carried out with “the intention to violate the socialist system”.
“Our honorees exemplify the best in journalism: work that shines a light on the impacts of war, corruption, and abuse of power on daily life,” CPJ President Jodie Ginsberg said in a statement. marking the announcement of the winners. “We look forward to honoring these inspiring journalists, who demonstrate the central role journalism plays in serving the public good.” The four winners will be honored at CPJ’s annual awards ceremony on November 17.
Trang is among a small group of individuals undertaking the personally risky business of independent journalism in Vietnam, for which his efforts and sacrifices also earned him the 2022 Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders in Vietnam. January. She was co-founder of the dissident blog Luat Khoa Tap Chi (Journal of Law) and has contributed to several other independent outlets, including The Vietnamese, an independent English-language website, and the exile-run blog Danlambao.
For years before her arrest, Trang spoke out on a range of issues relating to human rights, democratic rights and environmental protection. She was particularly critical of the government’s official narrative of the high-profile land dispute in the village of Dong Tam in northern Vietnam, which resulted in the death sentences of two brothers and 27 other villagers to prison terms of following a violent clash with police in January 2020.
His arrest is emblematic of a sharply repressive turn in Vietnam, which has seen dozens of dissident politicians, journalists and bloggers convicted for challenging, implicitly or not, the Vietnamese Communist Party’s monopoly on power. According to CPJ, Trang is among at least 23 journalists held behind bars for their reporting in Vietnam, making the country the fourth-highest number of imprisoned journalists of any country in 2021.
Last month, a Vietnamese court sentenced award-winning environmentalist Nguy Thi Khanh to two years in prison, after convicting her of tax evasion. His sentencing, which is just the latest of four environmental and civil society activists to be charged with taxes, demonstrates the Vietnamese government’s persistent desire to safeguard its political monopoly and its broad indifference to the state of international liberal opinion.
