Publisher: Graham Greenleaf UNSW Law Research/SSRN
Excerpt:
Processing personal data without the person’s consent (including for secondary processing) is only allowed in various situations of public interest, emergencies, for statistics or research after de-identification, and where ‘according to the provisions of law’ (art. 10). One criticism of this last exception is that it is ‘a loophole that is widely used in the legal system of Vietnam to give the government’s executive branch, especially ministries, an almost unlimited ability to interpret laws and regulations using circulars and executive decisions’. [12] There are no ‘legitimate interest’ exceptions allowing such processing.
Trinh Huu Long, co-director of Legal Initiatives for Vietnam (LIV) is quoted by IPI Contributor Loren Sandoval Arteaga on harassment and jailing of journalists.
“There is no sign that there will be improvements in the coming years”, Trinh Huu Long, the co-director of Legal Initiatives for Vietnam, an advocacy organization for human rights, democracy and law in Vietnam, told IPI. “The man who is largely responsible for the decline of media freedom in Vietnam over the past five years was re-elected to the top seat. The party is sending negative signals, as they elected a former spy chief of the national police to one of the most four powerful positions, and people have started to spread a rum or that he will be the next prime minister.”
Vi Tran, co-director of Legal Initiatives for VIETNAM shared that Facebook should be, at the very least, honest to its users whenever their posts or accounts gets suspended.
Mai Khoi, the “Lady Gaga of Vietnam,” wants that country’s vigilante force kicked off Facebook. The company told her the group is well within its rules.
For the past two years, Do Nguyen Mai Khoi has been trying painfully, futilely, to get Facebook to care about Vietnam. The Vietnamese singer and pro-democracy activist, known best simply as Mai Khoi, has tried tirelessly to warn the company of a thousands-strong pro-government Facebook group of police, military, and other Communist party loyalists who collaborate to get online dissidents booted and offline dissidents jailed. Her evidence of the group’s activity is ample, her arguments are clear, and despite the constant risk of reprisal from her own country’s leadership, her determination seemingly inexhaustible. The only problem is that Facebook doesn’t seem interested at all.
Facebook, once briefly heralded as a godsend for a country like Vietnam, where social media allows citizens to squeeze past the state’s censorship stranglehold on traditional media, has now become just another means of strangulation. Private groups filled with government partisans coordinate takedown campaigns — or worse — against any views deemed “reactionary” by the Vietnamese state, while Facebook continues to do little but pay lip service to ideals of free expression. The Intercept was able to gain access to one such closed-door Vietnamese censorship brigade, named “E47,” where it’s obvious, through Facebook’s apparent indifference, that the company has failed its users terribly.
To ensure that it continues to enjoy a dominant, highly lucrative share share of Vietnam’s corner of the internet — reportedly worth $1 billion annually — Facebook increasingly complies with content removal requests submitted by the country’s government on the basis that the content itself is illegal in Vietnam. It’s a form of censorship employed by governments worldwide, and one that Vietnam seems to have played hardball to enforce: In April, Reuters reported that the Vietnamese government slowed Facebook’s servers to the point of inoperability, leading Facebook to agree to comply with more official takedown requests.
But as Mai Khoi discovered, Vietnamese Facebook is also plagued by unofficial censorship, achieved not by declaring content illegal but by coordinating users to flag it for violating Facebook’s own content rules, known as the “Community Standards.” This dupes Facebook into removing ordinary political speech as though it were hate speech, violent incitement, or gory video.
In a sign of just how desperate the situation has become, many Vietnamese dissidents threatened by Facebook’s inaction say that for now, they’d settle for honesty. “Dealing with Facebook is like a walk in the dark for us activists,” said Vi Tran, co-founder of Legal Initiatives for Vietnam, a pro-democracy group. “If Facebook decides to delete a status for any reason, please let us know what is the reason. Giving us the ‘violation of Community Standards’ is not enough because it is arbitrary and vague.”
Legal Initiatives for VIETNAM co-founder Trinh Huu Long shares how their online magazines’ audience reach was greatly affected by Facebook’s agreement to censor anti-government posts in Vietnam. Amnesty International report says that there is a surge of people landing in jails for online criticism of the government.
Facebook is complicit in a dramatic increase in censorship on the platform in Vietnam, Amnesty International said Tuesday, in a new report detailing a surge in people jailed for their social media posts.
In the 78-page report, Amnesty compiled information from Facebook and Google as well as interviews with human rights activists. The organization found that Vietnam is currently holding 170 prisoners of conscience — the highest they’ve ever recorded. Of this, 69 were imprisoned for online activism. This includes those who criticized authorities’ response to COVID-19 and shared independent information about human rights. These posts are seen to infringe upon the government’s interests, which could lead to imprisonment under Articles 117 or 331 of the Criminal Code.
According to the report, human rights defenders have been increasingly facing harassment in recent years, receiving messages that include death threats, suspected to come from state-sponsored cyber troops like the Du Luan Vien, also known as “opinion shapers” who target Facebook activist pages.
Similarly, Force 47, a government-run cyberspace army believed to have 10,000 members, allegedly hacks anti-government websites and spreads pro-government messages online. All this to “fight against wrong views and distorted information on the internet.”
The existence of such measures has left many people in Vietnam in fear. Facebook remains the most widely-used social media platform in the country, a rare outlet in the one party state where the government heavily restricts and regulates its citizens’ internet use. In 2018, digital advertising revenue in Vietnam amounted to around $550 million, of which 70 percent went to Facebook and Google, Reuters reported, citing Vietnam-based market researcher Ants.
In the same year, the Vietnamese government passed a cybersecurity law that compels tech giants like Facebook and Google to store user data and censor content the government deems offensive. In April this year, Facebook agreed to censor posts in Vietnam after its local servers were taken offline, reportedly by actions from state-owned telecommunications companies. Facebook said it reluctantly complied with the government’s request to “restrict access to content which it has deemed to be illegal.” Most content restricted locally are still available outside Vietnam.
The increased censorship worries human rights groups and organizations that address local politics and social issues.
“We have used Facebook since day one of our operation back in 2014. For the first four years, it was amazing. We were able to spread our message wide and far. But since 2018, our Facebook page’s traffic has been reduced dramatically,” Trinh Huu Long, co-founder of Legal Initiatives for Vietnam (LIV), an online magazine dedicated to discussing political and social issues in Vietnam told VICE World News.
He said that three years ago, their Facebook posts could easily reach roughly 50,000 people but today, they’d be lucky to even get to 20,000.
Nearly two months ago, one of LIV’s co-founders was arrested for “making, storing, disseminating or propagandising information, materials and products that aim to oppose the State of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.” She is currently facing 20 years in jail. Such moves have led the magazine to change the way they disseminate their content, including the use of newsletters and channels on mobile messaging app Telegram. They are also currently trying to develop an app for their website.
Legal Initiatives for VIETNAM co-director Trinh Huu Long was quoted on the 2018 Cyber-Security Law for FromGrassroots Activism to Disinformation by Dien Luong.
Commentators often equate Vietnam’s internet freedom as similar to China. Indeed, the West regularly includes Vietnam on its “state enemies of the internet” list, as it does for China, Iran, or Syria (Deutsche Welle 2013). There is some truth to the concerns of Vietnam looking towards China as a model, given how ideologically, politically and economically aligned Hanoi is with Beijing. Vietnam is embracing Chinese hardware and packages of security software to increase its technical and infrastructural capabilities for information controls (Sherman 2019). A prominent example to justify this observation is Vietnam’s passage and enforcement of the 2018 Cyber-Security Law, which bears striking resemblances to a similar Chinese law (Trinh Huu Long 2017) which gives the government carte blanche to strictly police the internet, scrutinize personal information, censor online discussion, and punish or even jail dissidents.
Vietnam’s restrictive policy on press, free speech and expression makes Facebook the best alternative platform for citizens to let their voices be heard. Recently, Facebook blocked and suspended accounts criticizing the government, but Legal Initiatives for VIETNAM co-founder, Trinh Huu Long said much as he dislikes Facebook, he will have to stick with them.
In a country with no independent media, Facebook provides the only platform where Vietnamese can read about contentious topics such as Dong Tam, a village outside Hanoi where residents were fighting authorities’ plans to seize farmland to build a factory.
Facebook, whose site was translated into Vietnamese in 2008, now counts more than half the country’s people among its account holders. The popular platform has enabled government critics and pro-democracy activists — in both Vietnam and the United States — to bypass the communist system’s strict controls on the media.
But in the last several years, the company has repeatedly censored dissent in Vietnam, trying to placate a repressive government that has threatened to shut Facebook down if it does not comply, The Times found.
In interviews, dozens of Vietnamese activists, human rights advocates and former Facebook officials say the company has blocked posts by hundreds of users, often with little explanation.
Facebook has also barred Hanoi’s critics — including a Southern California-based opposition group — from buying ads to boost readership and has failed to stop pro-government trolls from swamping the platform to get dissidents’ posts removed.
Instead of using its leverage as Vietnam’s biggest media platform to hold the line against censorship, Facebook has, in effect, become an accomplice in the government’s intensifying repression of pro-democracy voices, critics say.
Facebook usually restricts posts and users for one of two reasons — violations of its “community standards,” which are rules the company says apply to users worldwide, or “local laws.” Posts in the latter category are blocked in the country where they are illegal but remain accessible elsewhere.
Access Now, a digital rights group that assists users who believe their Facebook access has been improperly restricted, said the company rarely explains its decisions to block or restore accounts — except to say they violated community standards.
Trinh Huu Long, a Hanoi critic who lives in Taiwan and runs a nonprofit online magazine called Luat Khoa, said he began exploring other modes of distribution after Facebook repeatedly blocked articles that had nothing to do with Vietnam. But he determined that abandoning the platform would drastically shrink his readership.
“Facebook is the king in Vietnam,” he said. “Content has to go through Facebook to reach an audience. So, much as I dislike Facebook, I have to stick with them.”
Legal Initiatives for VIETNAM co-director Vi Tran recalls why she stopped working as a lawyer in California to pursue activism for her motherland, Vietnam. Her works including as co-founders for 2 online magazines, Luật khoa and The Vietnamese- where she is an editor-in-chief, revolves around her mission that is “To speak up for those that can’t”.
She stopped working as a lawyer in California five years ago and started volunteering with a group of human rights in Vietnam to advocate for a democratic movement in the country. Vi Tran co-founded the independent magazine Luat Khoa in 2014 and, in 2017, the newspaper The Vietnamese , where she is editor-in-chief. Her mission: “To speak up for those that can’t”.
Vi Trandoes not regret leaving her job in California and moving to Taiwan. A lot of people, including her own family, she says, don’t see things this way: “They may think that I am crazy, but there is one life to live”. Vi thinks that the Vietnamese people deserves a better regime: “I believe all Vietnamese should have their human rights respected”.
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, Vietnam is the 6th most censored country on the world, with 11 journalists imprisoned. Reporters Without Borders states that in Vietnam “all media follow the Communist Party’s orders”. The only source of independently-reported information is bloggers and citizen-journalists, who are being subjected to persecution and prison.
“I admire the bloggers who went to jail to keep their faith and belief in free press and freedom of expression”, Vi says. Pham Doan Trang, Luat Khoa’s co-founder, was also detained in February 2018 and now she lives at an undisclosed location. Except for her, the writers and editors of Luat Khoa and The Vietnamese have not been persecuted. Vi assures that her team takes security very seriously: “We could relocate our colleagues if we think they face danger”.
But Luat Khoa and The Vietnamese have suffered another types of persecution: the websites are blocked in Vietnam since December 2017, one month after the birth of The Vietnamese. Vi suspects that was “because we attempted to get more publications in English, to give international readers about Vietnam, so the government blocked us”.
Why are Luat Khoa and The Vietnamese so uncomfortable to the government? Luat Khoa is the “Law Magazine”, it talks about law, geopolitics, human rights and so and is written in Vietnamese. It has about ten regular writers, and five part-time writers that work in The Vietnamese as well. Some of them (30%) are lawyers and 80% live in Vietnam.
“We are trying to help people that want political pluralism in Vietnam”
Protests in Vietnam. June 10, 2018
The Vietnamese is different from Luat Khoa. It is written in English and it acts on the basis that information about Vietnam is rather limited, foreigners often look into things that were produced by state-owned media. Vi says: “We needed to have an English site, to share with our international friends what is going on in Vietnam and give people a better idea of our movement”. The intention is “to educate people online via a website”.
According to Vi, Vietnam is “an authoritarian regime that controls every single aspect of people’s life; there is no open Internet, it is under government control, so people are wanting the information”. There are revolutionary and oppositional forces in Vietnam, people that want to see changes, that want political pluralism. “We are trying to help them”, she says.
Because of her current health problems, Vi Tran lives in California again. But she still works for The Vietnamese: “I am so grateful to be able to bring my compatriots stories to a larger stage and advocate for their rights”, she says. And adds: “I have tremendous love for my country and my people, no matter how far away I live away from them”.
“Government blocks us but people want to access our information and find a way”.
Hers is a matter of pure patriotic vision: “I have seen a lot of courageous people from Vietnam keep fighting for our human rights and civil rights, and I want to join them to push our democracy forwards”. For her, living to contribute to her country is no regrets: “I will continue to advocate and fight for Vietnam’s democracy until the day I pass away”.
Vi Tran, co-founder of Legal Initiatives for VIETNAM was interviewed by The Southeast Asian Press Alliance (SEAPA) on the “draconian” Cybersecurity Law enforced by the Vietnamese government.
Vietnam’s Cybersecurity Law, dubbed as “draconian” all over the world, took effect on 1 January 2019. The Southeast Asian Press Alliance (SEAPA) interviews Vi Tran of Legal Initiatives for Vietnam, an organization working for human rights, democracy and rule of law in the country, on the provisions of the law (Part 1), about the use of social media by the Vietnamese (Part 2) and opportunities for civil society to repeal it (Part 3).
Legal Initiatives for VIETNAM co-founder Trinh Huu Long is cited in the CID Faculty Working Paper- Rescinding Economic Incentives; Reversing Pro-labour Reforms.
Publisher: Center for International Development at Harvard University
Excerpt:
If the EU don’t demand it, the Vietnam Government will just leave it there… The right approach is for international partners to be very loud, very aggressive, while local partners are quietly supportive. If the EU is soft and local partners are loud, it is counter-productive and very dangerous for us.
CPV’s new leadership (which actually precedes Resolution #6) is now keen to centralise control. It no longer has TPP’s strong economic incentive to do otherwise. Since the demise of TPP, Vietnam joined China’s Belt and Road initiative (re-affirming geopolitical and economic ties with China), and passed several laws punishing dissent. The 2018 CyberSecurity Law is very similar to China’s: authorising the removal of seditious expression; mandating service providers disclose user data to authorities (Trinh, 2017). In July 2017, the Information and Communications Minister reported that ‘Google and Facebook had removed 3,367 clips with bad and poisonous content after being requested to do so by the Ministry of Information and Communications. Facebook removed more than 600 accounts that have violating content’. The Government has also mobilised over 10’000 online propagandists (just as in China). In June 2018, people were arrested for demonstrating against the draft law on special economic zones. Independent activists and bloggers are harassed, intimidated, assaulted, and detained (Human Rights Watch, 2019).
“According to Tran Vi, the editor in chief of the dissident online magazine the Vietnamese, the foundation was unable to agree on a replacement with the Communist authorities. By law, all Vietnamese organizations—from local sports clubs to national churches—have to be registered with either a government or Communist Party supervisory organization. The Phan Chau Trinh Culture Foundation was under the supervision of the Vietnam Union of Science and Technology Associations which is, in turn, supervised by the Ministry of Science and Technology. The science union has a record of allowing more outspoken organizations to shelter under its umbrella. However, in this case its umbrella does not seem to have been strong enough to resist the storm from above.
The energy behind the Phan Chau Trinh Culture Foundation comes from a well-known writer, Nguyen Ngoc. In October 2018, in a rare and surprising move, Ngoc announced that he had resigned from the Communist Party because of its treatment of another leading intellectual, Chu Hao. Chu Hao had also resigned from the party after being disciplined for allowing his Knowledge Publishing House to issue books the party said were “politically and ideologically wrong.” Among the titles the Central Inspection Commission objected to were several standard European works of political philosophy including books by John Stuart Mill, John Locke, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Friedrich Hayek.
According to the Vietnamese’s Tran Vi, Nguyen Ngoc and Chu Hao were the two leading candidates to replace Binh as the Phan Chau Trinh Culture Foundation’s president. However, “given what happened last year, regarding them leaving the party, it is almost impossible for the government to approve either one to be the new leader, leading to the closure.” Although Ngoc and Hao were members of the Communist Party, they were also critics of many of its policies. In December 2012 they, along with hundreds of others, signed “A Call for Human Rights,” asking the National Assembly to abolish Article 88 of the Penal Code that punishes “crimes of propaganda against the State” and strike down a government decree invoked to prevent demonstrations. The two men have been prominent critics of China’s behavior toward Vietnam, particularly in the South China Sea.”
