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Vietnam upholds long jail terms of dissident bloggersAFP HANOI -- Two Vietnamese dissident bloggers on Friday lost their appeals against long prison sentences for “anti-state propaganda,” a lawyer said, despite international calls for their release.
December 29, 2012, 12:05 am TWN A court in southern Ho Chi Minh City upheld the convictions of Nguyen Van Hai, alias Dieu Cay, and former policewoman Ta Phong Tan, confirming their respective jail terms of 12 and 10 years. “They did not listen to us or the defendants,” Hai's lawyer Ha Huy Son told AFP. A third blogger Phan Thanh Hai, who had pleaded guilty to the charges at their trial in September, saw his four-year prison term reduced by one year on appeal, Son said. The convictions relate to political articles the bloggers posted on the banned Vietnamese website “Free Journalists Club” as well as their own blogs, which criticized corruption, injustice and Hanoi's foreign policy. |
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