Shooting the climate change messenger in Vietnam
Vietnam’s detention of environmental activist Dang Dinh Bach is a crime against human rights and the global climate struggle
As Vietnam reels from the aftermath of Typhoon Yagi, including prolonged power outages, severe damage to roads and bridges and the forced evacuation of over 100,000 people, the realities of climate change loom large.
Rising sea levels threaten to submerge parts of the Mekong Delta, Vietnam’s rice bowl. Saltwater intrusion is already destroying croplands, while increasingly severe storms and floods wreak havoc on communities.
Vietnam is not alone – during the past month, the countries of the lower Mekong basin have each experienced devastating and record-breaking floods. These escalating climate impacts underscore the urgent need for bold climate action and resilience planning across the region.
Yet at this critical juncture, one of Vietnam’s most prominent climate defenders, Dang Dinh Bach, is two weeks into a hunger strike – not from the frontlines of the climate struggle, but from behind prison bars.
Bach’s protest shines a spotlight on the Vietnamese government’s ongoing crackdown on civil society and climate and environmental activists – a crackdown that is undermining both international climate goals and fundamental human rights.
During his three years behind bars, Bach and his family have filed nearly 30 formal complaints about mistreatment and inhumane conditions in prison, only to be ignored by prison authorities.
Bach now feels compelled to take this drastic step, at great risk to his health, to call attention to the plight of elderly and infirm prisoners suffering alongside him under harsh detention conditions.
Bach’s demands are simple and reasonable: abolish solitary confinement, allow prisoners time outdoors for exercise and social contact, ensure electrical safety, permit the exchange of books and adequate lighting for reading, and ensure contact and communication with family are not arbitrarily restricted.
Most urgently, Bach calls for proper medical treatment for prisoners with latent tuberculosis, a critical public health measure in the high-risk prison environment. These basic improvements would bring Vietnam’s prisons closer to compliance with the United Nations (UN) Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners and Convention Against Torture.
Last week, the 57th session of the UN Human Rights Council ended, including the Universal Periodic Review for Vietnam – a peer review of the country’s human rights record that takes place every 4.5 years.
During the interactive dialogue, the International Federation for Human Rights made a statement highlighting Bach’s case and the inhumane treatment he is enduring in prison. The statement emphasized ongoing and systematic reprisals and harassment of human rights defenders and repression of civil society in Vietnam, including of environmental and climate defenders.
In its response to the review process, the Vietnamese government accepted recommendations for improving the country’s notorious prison system, including ensuring conditions in line with the UN Standard Minimum Rules. Bach’s hunger strike underscores the urgency of putting these commitments into practice.
However, the government dismissed all recommendations calling for an end to the targeting and harassment of human rights defenders and repression of civil society, contrary to its stated commitments to both human rights and climate justice.
As founder and director of the Law and Policy of Sustainable Development Research Centre, Bach has dedicated his career to empowering communities through legal advocacy.
He played an instrumental role in revising Vietnam’s environmental protection laws, restricting plastic waste and pushing for a transition away from coal power. Bach trained over 100 young lawyers, building a new generation of environmental defenders in Vietnam.
It was precisely this impactful work that made Bach a target. In the months before his arrest, Bach led a 17-day campaign to reduce Vietnam’s reliance on coal.
Shortly after, he was detained on trumped-up charges of tax evasion – charges that the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has deemed “a violation of international law on the grounds of discrimination based on political or other opinion, related to his environmental work.”
Bach’s case is not isolated. Since 2021, six of Vietnam’s most prominent climate leaders have been imprisoned on similar dubious charges. The silencing of critical voices like Bach’s fundamentally undermines the possibility of achieving critical transitions to clean energy in Vietnam – and around the world.
Without robust civil society participation, there is a real risk that international climate agreements will not lead to meaningful change and may even exacerbate existing inequalities or environmental harms.
Bach’s hunger strike is a stark and timely reminder of both the human and climate costs of state repression. Next month, the international community will converge in Azerbaijan for the 29th Conference of Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP29).
Like Vietnam, Azerbaijan is jailing leading climate advocates and environmental defenders while escalating a crackdown on independent civil society.
In Vietnam, Azerbaijan, and across the world, allowing these injustices to go uncontested eliminates critical opportunities to challenge the status quo, undermining global efforts to address climate change and the credibility of multilateral forums.
The international community must use every diplomatic and economic lever available to secure Bach’s immediate and unconditional release – and the release of wrongfully imprisoned climate advocates and environmental defenders globally – and ensure climate commitments are predicated on respect for human rights.
As Bach wrote shortly before his arrest, “Only when [we] enter an era of genuine national development, built on rule of law and respect for human rights, can we hope to address the climate crisis.”
By Andrea Giorgetta & Maureen Harris – Asia Times – October 24, 2024