It often becomes apparent in our day-to-day life that the same rules don’t apply to us as they do to the powerful elite — whether it’s Donald Trump and his involvement with the Epstein case or the British royal family being granted immunity from prosecution. It’s hard to deny that the rich and powerful seem to be above the law, and the case of Đỗ Ngọc Phương Thùy’s death is no exception.

In May 2025, a former Deputy Chairman of the National Assembly’s Foreign Affairs Committee, and husband of a current minister, veered onto the wrong side of the road. He unintentionally collided with a motorbike carrying Đỗ Việt Hùng and his teenage daughter, Đỗ Ngọc Phương Thùy, before crashing into a tree, killing Phương Thùy.

Việt Nam’s national television channel VTV first covered the case 15 months after the crash, reporting that the police had exempted the driver, Nguyễn Sỹ Cương, from criminal liability. Young Vietnamese social media users demanded further investigation, organising protests online. They renamed the tree at the crash site the ‘justice tree’, encouraging the public to visit the site and place flowers beneath the tree.

Public uproar reached global audiences, and the efforts of students around the world led to the location of the crash being officially marked on Google Maps as ‘The Truth of Justice’.

Even though these displays of grief and dissent have been non-violent, the government has enacted widespread restrictive directives to censor students. Uninformed police cleared flowers from the base of the tree, and Hà Nội universities have begun actively suppressing student participation in these unofficial memorials.

A post from the Hà Nội University of Industry urges students to remain alert and “remain vigilant against attempts to exploit young people’s kindness and enthusiasm for malicious purposes and to divide the vital national unity bloc,” parroting the Ministry of Public Security, which blamed “hostile and reactionary forces” for manipulating young dissidents.

In response, national media outlets quietly removed and reposted versions of the report with now-blurred official documents, concealing the identification and blood alcohol test results as well as addresses associated with Cương.

The Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Public Security have also censored social media posts related to Nguyễn Sỹ Cương: illustrating systematic censorship nationwide. The official report is straightforward: Cương tested negative for alcohol and admitted responsibility.

This account itself is neither complicated nor contested but is the recall of official documents following government censorship of youth mobilisation. The obfuscation of documents without explanation, alongside factual inconsistencies and drastic efforts to shut down public attention to the case, raises legitimate questions about transparency and accountability.

When a state answers questions about an elite figure with delay, and with accusations against those asking, it invites the suspicion it hopes to avoid. The public’s scrutiny isn’t rooted in whether a legal exemption was the right decision, but whether anyone outside the elite world would get the same treatment — and if the process was transparent enough to find out.

In a one-party state where courts and media are not independent of the ruling party, that question cannot be answered from outside the elite inner circle. In the case of Đỗ Ngọc Phương Thùy’s death, the government was able to protect Nguyễn Sỹ Cương from the top down by controlling all outputs from the media and higher education institutes, begging the question of how far the powerful and rich will go to protect one of their own.

However, none of this is uniquely Vietnamese. Everywhere, power buys proximity to discretion: the sympathetic reading of rules, settlements, and decisions reached before the public learns the facts.

What distinguishes systems is whether independent courts, a free press, and open records can expose that discretion and correct it.