CHRIS BRUMMITT, Associated Press, Updated: September 24, 2012 – 5:11 AM
HANOI, Vietnam – A Vietnamese court issued jail sentences ranging from four to 12 years on Monday to three bloggers who wrote about human rights abuses, corruption and foreign policy, intensifying a crackdown on citizens’ use of the Internet to criticize the government.
The cases are particularly high-profile examples of the Communist government’s attempts to stifle challenges to its authority on the Internet, which has emerged as a major avenue for dissent in the country of 87 million people. President Barack Obama has mentioned one of the defendants, and the mother of another died after setting herself on fire to protest her daughter’s arrest.
The defendants, two men and one woman, are founding members of the “Free Journalists’ Club,” a group of citizen journalists who posted their work on the Internet. They were found guilty of spreading “propaganda against the state.”
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