Hoang Thi Minh Hong had worried for months that she could become the next environmental advocate swept up in Vietnam’s crackdown, so she closed her non-governmental organization (NGO) and began keeping a low profile.
However, it was not enough. Last month she became the fifth environmentalist jailed for tax evasion in what they call a campaign to silence them.
Her conviction came less than a year after a group of donors including the US and EU pledged to mobilize US$15.5 billion in funding as part of a Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP) to help Vietnam switch to clean energy faster.
Photo: AFP / Hoang Vinh Nam
The deal was hailed by US President Joe Biden as part of Vietnam’s “ambitious clean energy future.”
“Hong doesn’t deserve a single day in jail, because she’s innocent,” her husband, Hoang Vinh Nam, 54, told reporters. “She worked for the environment, for wildlife, for a better place. And now she’s been severely punished for doing that.”
Just a week before Hong’s conviction, Ngo Thi To Nhien, director of an independent energy policy think tank working on the JETP implementation, and a leading Vietnamese energy expert, was also arrested.
She was accused of appropriating documents from a state-owned power firm.
The Vietnamese government’s focus on environmental advocates appears to carry a particular message, said Jonathan London, an expert on contemporary Vietnam.
“What I think we’re seeing is a concerted effort ... to declare that all matters of public concern are to be addressed by the party and its state alone,” London said.
Environmental advocacy could pose a singular threat because it targets powerful economic interests, which in Vietnam “are always closely affiliated with state power,” he said.
The arrests began in 2021 with the detention of Dang Dinh Bach, a legal adviser and NGO worker who focused on coal issues.
He was sentenced to five years in prison on evidence that his wife, Tran Phuong Thao, said was fabricated.
“He pursued justice and he was on the side of the weak, but his work touched upon the interests of companies and authorities, and they wanted to shut his mouth,” the 29-year-old told reporters.
In January last year, authorities detained Nguy Thi Khanh, founder of Green ID, one of Vietnam’s most prominent environmental organizations.
She was an early and rare voice challenging Hanoi’s plans to increase coal power to fuel economic development. She was jailed later that year.
The 88 Project, which advocates for freedom of expression in Vietnam, found “serious irregularities” in the way criminal procedures and sentences were applied to Bach and Khanh — as well as two other jailed environmental advocates: Mai Phan Loi and Bach Hung Duong.
Bach received one of the heaviest sentences for someone convicted of tax evasion, despite the amount involved being much lower than in other cases with similar sentences, the group said.
Pham Thu Hang, a spokeswoman for the Vietnamese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, strongly rejected claims of a “politically motivated” crackdown on environmentalists, saying that each individual had contravened national law.
Khanh and Loi were both released from jail this year.
However, Bach is still in prison, has been intimidated and beaten, and is refusing to pay back the US$55,000 he is alleged to owe, his wife said.
Authorities have threatened to confiscate the apartment where she lives with their two-year-old son, she said.
One NGO worker, who declined to be named, said that several accountants in the industry had quit their jobs, fearful of Vietnam’s complex tax laws.
Nam said that Hong wrote to the tax department more than a year before her arrest and was told that CHANGE, her NGO, did not owe anything.
However, now she has to pay back US$300,000 — “more than the total income she received in the last 10 years,” he said. “It’s an injustice.”
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