Vietnam Imprisons Leading Climate Activist on False Charges

Land defenders around the world have long been targets of governments that would prefer to exploit the land they are trying to protect, whether that means clear-cutting, strip-mining, or polluting waterways with industrial runoff.

Oftentimes, countries will arrest land defenders on made-up charges that don’t actually have to do with their activism. That is what is happening in Vietnam, where a leading climate activist named Hoang Thi Minh has been imprisoned on false charges of tax evasion.

She is the fifth high-profile climate activist Vietnam has detained because of “tax evasion” in the past two years, the UN reports. Phil Robertson, deputy director of the Asia Division at Human Rights Watch, told NPR that Hoang's arrest “is part of a sweeping crackdown on environmental groups in Vietnam.”

Detained along with her husband and 15 current and former staffers of her environmental group CHANGE at the end of May, Hoang is the only one who remains in custody. She is being held incommunicado.

“These detentions by Vietnamese authorities are part of a concerning pattern of arrests of local environmental and civil society advocates,” said the U.S. State Department. “We also reiterate the vital importance of civil society partners like CHANGE in tackling global challenges, advancing sustainable prosperity in the global fight against climate change, and combating wildlife and timber trafficking.”

After watching her colleagues be arrested, Hoang decided to shutter CHANGE — which advocates for environmental and wildlife protection — fearing she would also be persecuted.

Ben Swanton, a director at a human rights group called The 88 Project called Hoang's arrest “a huge slap in the face for the international community.” Swanton told NPR: “It demonstrates that, contrary to its propaganda, the Vietnamese government does not respect human rights and does not want civil society to participate in the country's energy transition.”

One of the five most vulnerable countries in the world to climate change, according to USAID, Vietnam, with its thousands of miles of coastline, faces floods, droughts, and landslides. Climate change is also expected to hurt the country with rising temperatures and sea levels.

Vietnam pledged at the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) that it would work toward a target of net zero carbon emissions by 2050, and that it would lower methane emissions.

The UN said it is “deeply concerned” by the ongoing arbitrary arrests of environmental activists like Hoang: “Arrests of environmental human rights defenders are taking place amid Vietnam’s stated commitments to a just and sustainable energy transition.”

In 2018, Columbia University chose Hoang as one of its Obama Foundation Scholars because of her work promoting “environmental preservation through communication, education, and community organizing toward a vision of a green and clean Vietnam protected by all people.”