Relatives of a stand-up comedian said he was detained by police in Ho Chi Minh City, beaten and then fined for videos about social issues that he posted to his popular YouTube account six years ago.
Police arrested Nguyen Phuc Gia Huy on Tuesday and later fined him 7.5 million Vietnamese dong (about US$315) for videos that authorities said carried untruthful content. The content of those videos wasn’t disclosed.
He was also ordered to remove the false information from YouTube, according to the Tuoi Tre newspaper.
Huy, 41, is a stand-up comedian who participated in the “Vietnam’s Got Talent” TV show and has a YouTube channel – where he is known as Cucumber – that has nearly 900,000 subscribers.
His videos have focused on sensitive issues in society, such as border crossings and the recent attacks on local government facilities in Dak Lak province.
"Cucumber was abducted at around 10 a.m. on August 15 while eating alone,” a family member told Radio Free Asia. “Security forces took him away and then brought him to the station for questioning without giving any documents."
The family member added that he was beaten during his interrogation and wasn’t released until 11 p.m. the same day.
Previously, Huy was summoned to a police station in 2016 to discuss a video he posted that said, “Freedom of speech is different from personal humiliation.” Huy declared in the video that “in Vietnam, there is no freedom of speech.”
Huy’s relative noted that in 2022 he sued the Nhan Dan newspaper in what is considered the first lawsuit filed by an individual against a media outlet aligned with Vietnam’s Communist Party Central Committee.
Huy won the lawsuit against Nhan Dan, which agreed to remove articles critical of him. The relative questioned whether this week’s incident with police was related to the lawsuit.
Edited by Matt Reed and Malcolm Foster.