BANGKOK — A Vietnamese court on Wednesday convicted 14 democracy activists of plotting to overthrow the government and sentenced them to jail terms ranging from 3 to 13 years in what human rights groups said was the largest subversion case brought in Vietnam in years.
The defendants are bloggers, writers and political and social activists who have been accused of links to a banned United States-based pro-democracy group that the government accuses of seeking to overthrow it.
Nguyen Thi Hue, a defense lawyer, told the Associated Press in Vietnam that three defendants were sentenced to 13 years during the two-day trial and that 11 others received jail terms ranging from three to eight years. One of the three-year terms was suspended.
The charges of “activities aimed at overthrowing the people’s administration,” of “undermining of national unity” and of participating in “propaganda against the Socialist Republic of Vietnam” have often been brought against dissidents in government crackdowns that have waxed and waned over the years.
Rights groups say the trial, which opened Tuesday in the central province of Nghe An, is the largest subversion case to be presented in recent years.
“This is part of an ongoing, deepening crackdown we’ve been seeing for the past year and a half or two years,” said Phil Robertson, deputy director of the Asia division of Human Rights Watch. “These people are bloggers, land activists, have attended or tried to attend dissident trials, have been involved in dissident activities including supporting poor people and people with disabilities.”
He added: “This is a message to other dissidents and bloggers that Vietnam means business.”
He said the defendants were charged after attending a training course in Bangkok run by Viet Tan, an organization that in the 1980s led a resistance movement against the Vietnamese communist government but for the past few decades has declared that it is committed to peaceful political reform, democracy and human rights in Vietnam.
Several defendants are members of the Redemptorist group in the Catholic church, which has been engaged in community service and has taken up the causes of land seizures and corruption. Redemptorist activists have become increasingly assertive in Vietnamese movements for democracy and human rights, and some churches and parishes have become centers of dissent.
Some defendants have participated in peaceful protests related to China or in support of other dissidents who were on trial.
Five of them have blogged in support of freedom of expression and of multi-party democracy, Human Rights Watch said. Before the trial, one of them, Dang Xuan Dieu, was quoted as saying: “I have done nothing contrary to my conscience” and that in punishing him the government is “trampling on the eternal good morals of the Vietnamese nation.”
As Vietnam’s economy grows fitfully and its expanding middle class becomes more lively and engaged, the government has carried out vigorous campaigns to police the Internet and curb public demonstrations.
In a new year’s address that assessed the gains and shortcomings of Vietnam’s leadership, Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung restated the government’s concern that conspirators continue to threaten to undermine it.“We are regularly challenged by conspiracies to spark socio-political instability and violate our national sovereignty and territorial integrity,” he said.
On Tuesday, for example, as the dissident trial was getting under way in central Vietnam, the daily Vietnam News reported that a woman had been sentenced in Ho Chi Minh City to 42 months in prison for “activities against the state.”
The newspaper said the woman, Lo Thanh Thao, 36, had “scattered propaganda leaflets” and “stuck them inside several buildings” in Ho Chi Minh City. It did not report the content of the leaflets.
In the most high-profile recent conviction, a prominent Vietnamese legal scholar who had sued the prime minister and called for multiparty democracy was convicted of propaganda against the state in April 2011 and sentenced to seven years in prison and another three years under house arrest.
The conviction of the scholar, Cu Huy Ha Vu, then 53, the son of a Communist revolutionary and a well-known poet, was one of dozens involving Vietnamese lawyers and activists over recent years.
Last March, two Catholic activists were sentenced to five and three years in prison for distributing what the indictment called anti-government leaflets.
In September three prominent bloggers received long prison terms, including Nguyen Van Hai, who wrote under the name Dieu Cay, who was sent to prison for 12 years.
He was among several detained journalists mentioned by President Obama in a speech on World Press Freedom Day last May. Mr. Obama said the blogger’s first arrest in 2008, had “coincided with a mass crackdown on citizen journalism in Vietnam.”
