On February 27, the People’s Court of Hanoi will hear the case of prominent independent journalist Truong Huy San (known by his pen name Huy Duc). The authorities arrested Truong in June and charged him with “infringing upon the interests of the state” under article 331 of the penal code. This provision has increasingly been used to silence critics of the government. If convicted, Truong faces up to seven years in prison. Click to expand Image Huy Duc in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, May 27, 2012. © 2012 Eastgarden/Wikimedia Commons State media reported that between 2015 and 2024, Truong published 13 posts on his personal Facebook page that allegedly “infringed upon the interests of the State.” The authorities did not specify the contents of these posts deemed unlawful.A journalist for Bao Tuoi Tre (“Youth Newspaper”) in the late 1980s and the 1990s, Truong earned a reputation as a dogged reporter covering the country’s politics. In 2005 Truong received a Hubert H. Humphrey Fellowship to study at the University of Maryland in the United States. Returning to Vietnam in 2006, he started a popular blog in which he continued to publish editorial commentary on pressing social and political issues. The authorities shut it down in 2010. In 2012, Truong spent a year at Harvard University on a Nieman Fellowship, during which he wrote his most influential work, Ben Thang Cuoc (“The Winning Side”), widely considered the most important nonfiction book about postwar Vietnamese history and politics. It has never been sold publicly inside Vietnam.Truong has continued to write about Vietnam’s social and political problems, including deforestation and other environmental issues. With more than 350,000 Facebook followers, he remains one of the platform’s most influential Vietnamese political commentators. Prior to his arrest, he posted about the dangers posed by concentrating power in Vietnam’s highly repressive Ministry of Public Security, which To Lam, current general secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam, formerly led.In a 2013 interview, Truong said, “no free man would ever choose prison. But, in some cases, to defend a right to freedom, prison cannot be avoided. If everybody avoids prison, we will never achieve freedom.”The Vietnamese government should immediately drop all charges against Truong, release him from custody, and free all those who have been prosecuted for the peaceful expression of their political views.