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Đan Thanh wrote this article in Vietnamese and published it in Luật Khoa Magazine on Sept. 25, 2025. Đàm Vĩnh Hằng translated it into English for The Vietnamese Magazine.

Vingroup, Việt Nam’s largest private conglomerate, recently filed civil lawsuits against 68 organizations and individuals at home and abroad, accusing them of spreading false information online. The targets, a mix of websites and personal social media accounts, allegedly fabricated stories about the company's financial situation, its products, and the personal lives of its senior executives.

The decision to pursue civil rather than criminal action is a shrewd one. It represents a potentially welcome and progressive shift in a Vietnamese legal culture that has long relied more heavily on criminal rather than civil proceedings

A Major Shift in Legal Culture In Việt Nam’s collective memory, the corporate instinct to use the police to settle public disputes has often backfired. The infamous “ Dr. Thanh fly ” incident is a prime example: after a consumer found a fly in a beverage bottle and demanded 500 million đồng in compensation, the company, Tan Hiep Phat, had him arrested for extortion during the payout, leading to a seven-year prison sentence.

The public backlash triggered a communications crisis that wiped 2,000 billion đồng from the company’s market value. Even Vingroup itself has a history of “ reporting to the police ” to handle conflicts with the public, including its own customers.

A more recent case that drew public boycotts was the sexual harassment scandal at the Nhã Nam publishing house. After a director was accused of harassment, the company responded to public criticism by filing defamation complaints against a prominent author who had supported the victim. This attempt to use legal and police channels to silence a critic, while the original harassment complaint resulted in no charges, was seen by the public as a heavy-handed and inhumane approach.

Against this backdrop, Vingroup's new strategy is significant. While not the first company to file civil lawsuits, it is the largest enterprise to do so. It must be acknowledged that taking disputes to civil court in Việt Nam is a progressive, civilized choice that can create a more positive public perception of how conflicts over speech are handled.

Notably, this move has even earned praise from a top censorship official. Lê Quang Tự Do, head of the Authority of Broadcasting, Television, and Electronic Information, told VietNamNet:

“Personally, I support Vingroup’s decision to sue. I hope this is not just Vingroup’s approach but one that other organizations and individuals will adopt more often, bringing cases to court to protect their legitimate rights, honor, and reputation. Because this is an approach that is both in line with the law and aligned with the civilized trends of our time.”

Civil or Criminal? Many countries still have criminal defamation laws on the books. However, there are two key differences in how they are applied compared to Việt Nam.

First, in most developed nations, the judiciary is extremely reluctant to use criminal law to punish speech, preferring civil remedies. Second, the clear global trend, championed by the United Nations and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), is to abolish criminal defamation entirely.

The core distinction is simple: civil law addresses harm to private interests, while criminal law addresses acts that are dangerous to the public interest. From that perspective, false statements that harm an individual or an organization's reputation—a private matter covered under Article 34 of the 2015 Civil Code—should be handled by civil courts through corrections, apologies, or compensation.

A crime, according to Article 8 of the 2015 Penal Code, must be a "socially dangerous act” that must: (1) infringe upon social order or the public interest, and (2) it reach a level of danger significant enough to merit punishment.

Yet Việt Nam’s Penal Code contains at least four provisions (Articles 117, 156, 331, and 288) that are regularly used to criminalize speech. This raises a fundamental question: if false speech infringes on personal rights, why is it interpreted as a "socially dangerous" act against the public?

Here, the law reveals its contradictions, failing to clearly distinguish between private harm and public danger, or between private and public interests. Whether a legal system chooses civil or criminal remedies for such disputes speaks volumes about whether that system leans toward freedom or control.

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Against this backdrop, the growing choice to resolve speech-related disputes through civil law is an encouraging development. It marks a significant shift in legal consciousness away from the instinct to "report to the police" and toward more equitable, civilized mechanisms. The path forward remains complex, however, as even civil lawsuits may still contain elements of inequality and can always be vulnerable to criminalization.