The Vietnam Briefing, released every Monday morning at Vietnam time, looks at Vietnam’s social and political developments of the past week.

Vietnam orders tech companies to store users’ data locally

• In a new decree issued on August 15, the Vietnamese government has sought to further tighten cybersecurity rules and its control over local internet users by ordering technology firms to store users’ data in Vietnam and to set up local offices, Reuters reports.
• The new regulations, which are expected to take effect on October 1, will apply to popular social media platforms currently operating in Vietnam, such as Facebook, Google’s Youtube, TikTok, and telecommunications operators.
• According to the new rules, data belonging to and created by users in Vietnam, including account names, credit card info, email and IP addresses, service use time, most recent logins and registered phone numbers, must be stored within Vietnam. The decree added that data about local users’ relationships, including their friends and groups they interact with online, must also be stored domestically.
• Meanwhile, the authorities can request to have data access for investigation purposes and demand that the tech companies remove content deemed violating the government’s guidelines. Foreign tech companies are required to set up local data storage and representative offices within 12 months after receiving instructions from the Ministry of Public Security (MPS), and will have to store the data onshore for a minimum period of 24 months, according to the decree via Reuters.
• In Freedom House’s report, Vietnam was rated “not free” in terms of internet freedom. The new decree has been regarded as the government’s latest legal toolkit deployed to curtail freedom of expression and to silence opposition opinions on social media in Vietnam.

Committee to Protect Journalists calls on Vietnam to release journalist Pham Doan Trang

• In a press release on August 16, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), a press freedom advocate, called on the Vietnamese authorities “not to contest journalist Pham Doan Trang’s appeal” and to “release her without terms or conditions that would affect her ability to work as a journalist.”
• The statement was published in response to the news reports about Doan Trang’s appeals trial on August 25 held by the Hanoi People’s High Court.
• “The sooner Vietnam releases all of the journalists it wrongfully holds behind bars, the sooner it will be taken seriously as a responsible global actor,” said Shawn Crispin, CPJ’s senior Southeast Asia representative.
• Doan Trang will also be honored with CPJ’s International Press Freedom Award on November 17 this year as a recognition of “her courage in reporting in the face of persecution.”
• The CPJ statement came amid reports that Doan Trang’s health is deteriorating in prison. She’s reportedly suffering from many health problems, such as sinusitis, arthritis, gynecological problems and prolonged menstruation. Doan Trang has also been recovering from a previous COVID-19 infection.

Vietnam’s appellate courts uphold activists’ convictions after consecutive hearings

• The Hanoi People’s High Court, on August 16, held an appeal hearing for Le Van Dung, a citizen journalist and online commentator, who was previously sentenced to five years in jail on the conviction of “distributing anti-State propaganda” under Article 88 of Vietnam’s former 1999 Penal Code. The court later upheld Dung’s sentence despite his argument that he only practiced the right to freedom of speech enshrined in Vietnam’s Constitution.
• On the same day, an appellate court in Vietnam’s Dak Lak Province upheld a four-year prison sentence of the ethnic minority activist Y Wo Nie, who was sentenced to four years in jail for “abusing democratic freedoms to infringe upon the State and individuals’ legitimate rights” under Article 331 of Vietnam’s 2015 Penal Code. Nie was an advocate for religious freedom in Vietnam’s Central Highlands. It was reported that there were no witnesses or judicial supervisors during his appeals trial.
• On August 17, an appellate court in Hanoi held a trial for two land rights activists, Trinh Ba Phuong and Nguyen Thi Tam, who respectively received 10 years and six years in jail in 2021 for “distributing anti-State propaganda” under Article 117 of Vietnam’s Penal Code.
• The court upheld the two land activists’ sentences after the trial. Phuong and Tam’s families were not allowed to enter the courtroom, despite the trial being declared to be open to the public.

HRW: Vietnam adopts global LGBT health standard

• In a news article released on August 18, Human Rights Watch acknowledged that the Vietnamese health ministry’s earlier confirmation on August 3 that same-sex attraction and being transgender are not mental health conditions “brings Vietnam’s health policy in line with global health and human rights standards.”
• “The Vietnamese Health Ministry’s recognition that sexual orientation and gender identity are not illnesses will bring relief to LGBT people and their families across Vietnam,” said Kyle Knight, senior health and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights researcher at Human Rights Watch.
• But according to an HRW report in 2020, although Vietnam has made some progress on LGBT rights in recent years, there are still an existing stigma, factual misunderstandings, and negative stereotypes against the LGBT community in the country.
• One of the most common misconceptions about homosexuality and same-sex attraction in Vietnam is that they are diagnosable mental health conditions. “This false belief is rooted in the failure of the government and medical professional associations to effectively communicate that same-sex attraction is a natural variation of human experience,” writes the news article.
• On the other hand, HRW’s senior health and LGBT rights researcher Kyle Knight said that the Vietnamese Health Ministry’s new directive “is a major step in the right direction.” “Vietnam’s Health Ministry has boosted fundamental rights with this directive, and LGBT people now have increasingly firm grounding for expressing themselves without fear of negative reactions,” Knight added.

FIDH: Vietnam uses arbitrary detention and judicial harassment against four environmental rights defenders

• In an urgent appeal addressed to Vietnamese government officials on August 17, The Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders, a partnership of the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) and the World Organization Against Torture (OMCT), expressed its “deepest concerns” about the Vietnamese authorities’ use of legal harassment, especially the use of tax evasion charges, to persecute and criminalize four environmental rights defenders, Dang Dinh Bach, Mai Phan Loi, Bach Hung Duong, and Nguy Thi Khanh.
• The Observatory also “strongly condemns” the Vietnamese authorities’ unfair convictions and arbitrary detention of these environmental activists. In conclusion, it urged the authorities to “put an end to all acts of harassment against the above-mentioned human rights defenders and immediately and unconditionally release them.”
• Bach, Loi, and Duong had their appeals hearings on August 11. The Hanoi appellate court slightly reduced Loi and Duong’s prison terms to 45 and 27 months, respectively, while upholding Bach’s earlier conviction of five-year imprisonment. They were all convicted of “committing tax evasion” under Article 200 of Vietnam’s Penal Code. Dang Dinh Bach’s wife, Tran Phuong Thao, said that she was barred from entering the courtroom by security forces stationed outside the court.

Vietnamese artist ‘shocked’ after being ordered to destroy 29 paintings

RFA: