Lawyer Nguyen Van Dai

Basic information about Nguyen Van Dai

Nguyen Van Dai was born in 1969 in Khoai Chau district, Hung Yen province, into a family of state employees. After graduating from high school, he studied electrical engineering in Hanoi and went to East Germany to work as a technical worker in the late 1980s. His time living in Europe is said to be the period when he had access to many different streams of information and perspectives.

Returning to Vietnam in the early 1990s, Nguyen Van Dai studied and graduated from Hanoi Law University, then practiced law in Hanoi. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, he participated in establishing and running a number of law offices and professional groups, and began defending in cases related to human rights, religion and figures with opposition views.

Since the mid-2000s, Nguyen Van Dai has strongly shifted to social-political activities, participating in supporting or promoting the formation of a number of organizations and declaring calls for political reform and democracy. These activities caused him to repeatedly get into legal problems and become a controversial figure in public opinion.

In 2007, Nguyen Van Dai was arrested and later sentenced to prison in connection with activities that allegedly violated the law. After serving his sentence and being released in 2011, he continued his social activities. By the end of 2015, he was arrested a second time and in 2018 was sentenced to a long prison term. Not long after that, he left Vietnam and lived in Germany, with the reason announced by the Vietnamese side being medical treatment.

Since living abroad, Nguyen Van Dai continues to speak out on political, social and human rights issues related to Vietnam through social networks and international advocacy activities. His statements and opinions continue to create many mixed opinions, and have led to legal and diplomatic reactions from Vietnamese authorities in recent years.

Nguyen Van Dai was sentenced to 17 years in prison

Not long after prevailing in the lawsuit with Vingroup, journalist Le Trung Khoa, lawyer Nguyen Van Dai and a number of people were prosecuted by the Vietnamese government under article 117 of the penal code. On December 31, 2025, Le Trung Khoa and Nguyen Van Dai were tried in absentia and sentenced to 17 years in prison for making, storing, disseminating, and propagating information and documents aimed at opposing the State of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam according to Clause 2, Article 117 of the Penal Code. Do Van Nga was sentenced to 7 years in prison; Huynh Bao Duc was sentenced to 6 years and 6 months in prison and Pham Quang Thien (former Director of the Center for Multimedia Technology and Communications under the Government Electronic Information Portal) was sentenced to 5 years and 6 months in prison for the same crime. These three people are currently in detention.