Hoang Thi Hong Thai outside the police interrogation room in Hanoi, April 2025.
© Private
(Bangkok) – The Vietnamese authorities should immediately quash the criminal conviction of a prominent commentator on social media and release her, Human Rights Watch said today.
On July 29, 2026, a court in Hanoi convicted Hoang Thi Hong Thai and sentenced her to six years in prison. Hanoi police had arrested her on January 7 for comments she made on social media criticizing the Vietnamese government and charged her with anti-state propaganda under article 117 of the penal code.
“Hoang Thi Hong Thai should never have been prosecuted for speaking out against injustice and the Vietnamese government’s violations of people’s rights,” said Patricia Gossman, senior associate Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “The government should immediately release her and others persecuted for peacefully exercising their rights to freedom of expression.”
Hoang Thi Hong Thai, 45, has published hundreds of comments on social media focusing on socio-political issues and expressing empathy for people who have suffered government repression. As of July 2026, her Meta account had 118,000 followers.
In April 2025, the police interrogated her about her writing and threatened to arrest her. A few days later, she posted a message on social media apologizing for having no choice but to stop writing as the police were pressuring her to choose between expressing her views or taking care of her autistic child. “Be a mother or go to prison,” she wrote. A few days later, she resumed writing.
In June 2025, she published an online post criticizing articles 117 and 331 of Vietnam’s penal code for violating the right to freedom of speech enshrined in Vietnam’s constitution, and urged the National Assembly to amend or abolish these laws. Article 117 broadly prohibits “making, storin
