CORRESPONDENCE - 85A COMBINED REPORTS OF HUMAN RIGHTS IN VIETNAM 2012

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VIETNAM 22 On the day of his scheduled release in October 2010 from a 30 -month sentence for alleged tax evasion, authorities rearrested Nguyen Van Hai (also known as Dieu Cay) for antistate propagandizing, allegedly based on three- year -old blog postings. There were unconfirmed reports during the year that he lost his arm while in custody. In January the People's Court of Lang Son Province convicted Vi Duc Hoi, a former CPV official from the province, of antistate propagandizing after his online postings in 2007 -09 of prodemocracy articles criticized the CPV. The court sentenced him to eight years in prison followed by five years' house arrest (reduced on appeal in April to five years' imprisonment and three years' house arrest). Hoi, a CPV member beginning in 1980, had been removed from the CPV in 2007 after he authored online articles disparaging corruption in the party. Web sites critical of the government that were hosted overseas were continually targeted throughout the year by distributed denial -of- service attacks. A majority of the targeted Web sites were news - aggregator sites that regularly republished postings by high - profile dissidents critical of the government. Hackers rendered several other Web sites inoperable. In June and July the popular news portal VietnamNet was hacked multiple times and rendered inaccessible. An investigation into these attacks continued at year's end. In August a botnet attacked a Web site belonging to a foreign -based prodemocracy group using an estimated 77,000 Internet Protocol addresses located in Vietnam, which suggested government involvement, according to Access Contested: Security, Identity, and Resistance in Asian Cyberspace. Political dissidents and bloggers routinely reported having their home Internet connections disconnected on orders from the security services. The government used firewalls to block some Web sites that it deemed politically or culturally inappropriate, including sites operated by overseas Vietnamese political groups. The government appeared to have lifted most of its restrictions on access to the Voice of America Web site, although it continued to block Radio Free Asia most of the time. BBC online in Vietnamese and English was blocked at times during the year. The Ministry of Information and Communication requires owners of domestic Web sites, including those operated by foreign entities, to register their sites with the government and submit their planned content and scope to the government for approval. Enforcement remained selective.