A Vietnam court Tuesday sentenced a journalist who wrote about issues including corruption, land rights and the environment to seven years in jail, his sister said, the latest government critic to be put behind bars.
Nguyen Vu Binh — a political activist who served almost five years in jail in the early 2000s — was accused of producing propaganda against the state.
Communist Vietnam has no free media and clamps down hard on any dissent. It is the world’s third biggest jailer of journalists according to the Reporters Without Borders (RSF) press freedom campaign group.
“He was given seven years in jail,” his sister Nguyen Thi Phong told AFP following the trial in Hanoi.
“At the trial, he told the court he was innocent. He said he did not call on anyone to act against the state. He said he was exercising his right to freedom of speech.”
