Nguyen was arrested on July 5, 2022, charged under Article 117 of Vietnam’s Criminal Code (2015) for ‘making, storing, distributing or propagandising information, materials, documents to oppose the state of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam’, concerning 12 videos posted on Nguyen’s YouTube and Facebook pages said to be ‘anti-state propaganda’. A Hanoi court handed down the six-year sentence on April 12, including a two-year period of house arrest after the initial jail term is served.
From April to July 2022 until the day before his arrest, Nguyen was a contributor to the United States government-funded news service Radio Free Asia Vietnamese Service, publishing more than 130 blog posts to the site. The journalist has also been working as a supporter of peaceful activism since the early 2000s, participating in anti-China protests and socio-political discourse in Vietnam.
Nguyen has previously been detained by Vietnamese authorities and has been subject to various travel bans and incidents of harassment. Following his arrest, Nguyen was held incommunicado, unable to speak with his lawyer until February 16, 2023, after seven months of being detained. His family was not permitted to visit him before his trial.
Anti-state charges laid under controversial articles of the 2015 Criminal Code have been used to silence several independent and critical journalists in Vietnam. In March 2022, freelance reporter Le Van Dung was sentenced to five years in prison for discussing socio-political issues in his work between March 2017 and September 2018 and was one of more than 60 Vietnamese journalists persecuted and imprisoned at the time for their critical reporting on Vietnam’s ruling party, according to Human Rights Watch.
The IFJ said: “The IFJ condemns the sentencing of Nguyen Lan Thang and calls on the Vietnamese authorities to drop all charges against him and ensure his immediate release. The continued use of arbitrary anti-state charges under Vietnam's Criminal Code to silence independent and critical journalism is unacceptable and places grave restrictions on press freedom and freedom of expression.”