On Thursday September 28, Vietnamese justice sentenced Hoang Thi Minh Hong, a very prominent environmental activist, to three years in prison for tax evasion, her lawyer announced. The court in Ho Chi Minh City (South) found the founder of the NGO Change guilty of not paying $275,000 in taxes linked to her environmental campaigns, said her lawyer, Nguyen Van Tu .
Hoang Thi Minh Hong was the first Vietnamese woman to travel to Antarctica, in 1997, as part of a United Nations mission on global warming. She then worked for the World Wide Fund (WWF) and founded the NGO Change in 2013, which closed in October 2022 after a wave of arrests against her colleagues. With this NGO, she wanted to mobilize younger generations on Vietnam’s environmental challenges such as climate change, wildlife trafficking and pollution.
The 50-year-old activist was placed in pre-trial detention pending trial after her arrest on May 30. Her husband, Hoang Vinh Nam, said he was “disappointed”. “The sentence imposed is unfair to Hong. The defense attorney did his best, but his arguments were not properly considered. » Ms. Hong admitted to the charges against her and paid the state 3.5 billion dong (the equivalent of $145,000) in exchange for leniency, state media reported.
Wave of repression against environmental activists
Vietnam is regularly accused by human rights groups of repressing all dissenting voices, particularly those denouncing environmental abuses. Since 2021, the communist authoritarian regime has imprisoned four other influential environmental activists on charges of tax evasion.
Among them are a lawyer, director of an NGO specializing in legal and environmental issues: Dang Dinh Bach was sentenced in 2022 to five years in prison and has been leading his fourth hunger strike since June 2023. In this list, we also find Nguy Thi Khanh. This 2018 winner of the Goldman Prize for the environment, the “Green Nobel”, spent almost a year in prison, before being released in May 2023. She is one of the few to criticize the government regarding its ever-increasing use of coal-fired power plants in the energy sector.
This wave of repression compromises the country’s efforts to fight against the effects of climate change, to which it is particularly vulnerable, several NGOs denounced last year. The paradox is that communist Vietnam is a good student of the energy transition of the countries of the South, because it set itself a goal of net zero emissions in 2050 during COP26 in 2021 in Glasgow (United Kingdom). However, the contradictions are glaring between the scale of the efforts to be made, Hanoi’s maximalist economic growth ambitions and the communist regime’s obsession with excluding emerging players in citizen ecology.
Carbon neutrality targeted by 2050 is a goal pushed in December by a group of rich countries and international institutions, including France and the European Union, which pledged to mobilize $15.5 billion to help Hanoi.