In Vietnam, environmental defense is increasingly a crime
In the past two years, six prominent environmental defenders have been imprisoned in Vietnam, sending a chill across civil society in the one-party state.In the past, activists in Vietnam were often charged with spreading anti-state propaganda. More recently, ambiguous tax laws have been used against environmental experts and advocates, and 2023 saw the use of a novel charge: misappropriation of state documents.Analysts say the moves against environment defenders are part of an effort to clamp down on civil society in general, and environmental activism in particular, due to fears that such movements could serve as an engine for broad-based organizing outside of party control.
Until recently, the Hanoi-based nonprofit where Hưng works as a legal advocate distributed its research online, freely circulating information it intended to support policies on climate change and other environment issues. Now, Hưng says, such reports — many of them funded by international organizations— are only circulated internally among trusted working partners.
Hưng (not his real name) explains that this isn’t because his organization doesn’t wish to give the public access to its work. Instead, it is because the plight of a colleague, high-profile energy policy adviser Ngô Thị Tố Nhiên, has sent a chill down their spines.
Nhiên, founder and executive director of Vietnam Initiative for Energy Transition Social Enterprise, has been detained since October 2023. In June, she was reportedly sentenced to 42 months in prison time for misappropriating state documents. Her trial was held behind closed doors and, unlike in previous cases involving environmental defenders, her conviction has not been publicized in state-affiliated media. Two state employees who worked with Nhiên on projects related to Vietnam’s Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP) were also arrested in October 2023: Dương Đức Việt, a senior employee from the National Power Transmission Corporation, and Lê Quốc Anh, head of the system analysis department of the Power Engineering Consulting 1 company, faced the same charges as Ngô, though even less is known publicly about the outcomes of their cases.
“We are quite scared now,” says Hưng, adding that security agents frequently pass by his organization’s office to inquire about the group’s activities.
For Hưng and other environmental activists interviewed for the article, the arrest of Nhiên, while chilling, was hardly a surprise. Nhiên is the sixth prominent expert working on environmental issues, particularly on the issues of energy transition, to have been arrested within two years.
“Up to now, we do not know yet which state documents Nhiên and her colleagues have misappropriated,” says Hưng.
Vaguely defined laws have been weaponized to criminalize environmental defenders in the single-party state. To make the matters worse, ambiguous rules on nonprofit organizations, the lack of an independent judiciary and a tightly controlled media make it even harder for environmental defenders to defend themselves and their organizations from charges made against them.
In fact, many environmental advocates approached for this article declined to be interviewed because, as one informant says, “the government is watching closely the environmental sector.”
New bottles, same wine
The charge Nhiên faces, misappropriating public documents, is a new one for activists. Previously, high-profile independent environmental defenders were generally charged with creating and circulating anti-state propaganda or with abusing fundamental freedoms. Such charges have been leveled against activists such as Cù Huy Hà Vũ, Nguyễn Ngọc Như Quỳnh and Phạm Thị Đoan Trang, who publicly held governments accountable for environmental disasters and other human rights abuses.
Within the last three years, tax evasion charges have been leveled against leaders of registered nonprofit organizations, including Mai Văn Lợi, Đặng Đình Bách, Nguỵ Thị Khanh and Hoàng Thị Minh Hồng — all environment advocates who were involved in work related to the JETP.
These charges (conducting and disseminating anti-state propaganda and tax evasion) are also similar to those faced by more than 160 Vietnamese prisoners of conscience as of 2023.
While Vietnam has publicly committed to improving its human rights record and currently sits on the U.N. Human Rights Council, its commitment to reform appears to be deeply ambiguous.
“Like in China, NGOs remain heavily controlled by the state and mainly function as extensions of government in policy implementation, program inputs and consultancy, while policy criticism is out of bounds,” says Ole Bruun, professor of society and globalization at Denmark’s Roskilde University, who has spent years doing research on various environmental issues in both China and Vietnam.
Earlier this year, international human rights group Project 88 obtained a copy of a confidential document called Directive 24, issued in July 2023 by the Political Bureau of the Central Party Committee (Politburo). The organization was unable to fully verify the text, but it corresponds with public statements from the party, and NPR also cross-referenced the contents with a leaked copy from another source. The document, according to Project 88 “frames all forms of international commerce and cooperation as threats to national security” and seeks to block both international and local groups from “using increased international cooperation as a means to promote an independent civil society and domestic political opposition groups.” The directive calls for “developing and organizing the strict implementation of policies and laws on national security” in relation to the activities of NGOs and civil society groups.
For Vietnamese activists interviewed for the article, this directive represents a written officialization of ongoing actions against human rights activists in general and environmental defenders in particular: restrictions on activities, monitoring activists’ travel to international rights events, arbitrary arrests or harassment of activists and a broader proscription of independent civil society.
“Now, you don’t need to be an outright dissident to be jailed,” Hưng says.
Meanwhile, the Vietnamese government has repeatedly denied international reports on its human rights issues, with officials criticizing reports from entities like the U.N. as “unobjective” and “unbalanced.”
Effects on policy
Lê Quốc Quân, a human rights lawyer who is now exiled in Canada, has firsthand experience with the weaponization of tax laws against activists. In 2013, he was charged with evading corporate income tax of $30,000 and jailed for 30 months following a hasty closed-door trial. Lê was held incommunicado for months, refused access to his lawyer and denied pre-trial release.
“Tax evasion is the easiest accusation for everyone. It is easy to prove from the perspective of the state, but it causes a lot of difficulties for lawyers when defending against it,” Lê says. “In Vietnam, there is a mentality that ‘everyone evades taxes,’ so judges think that accusing someone of tax evasion is always correct, which reduces their moral qualms.”
However, being convicted of tax evasion brings great shame to activists. In Vietnam, Lê explains, an activist should be seen as a morally exemplary and patriotic citizen. Failing to fulfil tax duties is not only seen as being not law-abiding but also as not being patriotic.
And while prosecutors can count on aid and information from state bodies, lawyers representing activists often fight an uphill battle. “Lawyers often have limited knowledge of tax regulations (which are very complex), lack resources to work on tax cases (as they often work pro bono), and have little chance to meet with authorities to gather documentation and evidence to defend their clients,” Lê says.
The regulations involved are numerous and confusing. In Vietnam, nonprofit organizations are not explicitly exempt from tax, but neither does the law on tax administration stipulate exactly what is required of nonprofit entities. Instead, tax policies for nonprofit organizations come from a hodgepodge of agencies, including the Ministry of Finance and Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment. Moreover, foreign funding is ambiguously taxable.
For example, Ngụy Thi Khanh, director of policy advocacy organisation GreenID was penalized for not paying a 10% tax on the prize money from her in 2018 Goldman Environmental Prize, even though no law clearly supports such taxation. She was sentenced to two years imprisonment, eventually serving 21 months before being quietly released in 2023.
“It is extremely common for these types of organizations (or even other businesses) to not adhere to all bookkeeping and accounting requirements,” Nguyễn says. “Finding mistakes and legally wrongful conduct within these organizations would be easy.”
However, Nguyễn says, it is equally simple to disprove some of the accusations against activists. Nguyễn cites the example of Mai Phan Lợi, a prominent activist charged with tax evasion. State media report that Mai evaded taxes on 19 billion Vietnamese dong of income in 10 years (roughly $75,000 per year).
That 19 billion dong equals the entire amount of funding Mai received during that period, Nguyễn says. But when deductibles like payroll, service contracts and other expenses are factored in, “there should be nothing left to consider ‘taxable income,’” says Nguyễn, adding that it is customary and mandatory for NGOs to disburse the funding they have received from sponsors for the project.
Nguyễn also argues that punishment is disproportionately high. “Administrative fines and warnings should be enough to keep the NGOs in check,” he says. “The fact that … the regime criminalizes such an insignificant amount … proves that the charges are mostly politically motivated.”
Lan (not her real name), a CSR officer at a private company who has cooperated with many of the arrested NGO leaders, notes that the organizations whose leaders were arrested were part of the Vietnam Union of Science and Technology Associations (VUSTA). Yet, VUSTA itself remains exempt from all tax evasion charges, she says.
“Tax is checked rigorously every year in Vietnam. It is quite impossible for a small NGO to evade it for 10 years,” Lan says.
Exiled lawyer Lê said that despite his release in 2015 and current exile in Canada, he has still been under pressure to pay the tax that he had been accused of evading.
“I have never admitted to [tax evasion] and have continued to make a request for cassation. The situation remains unchanged until now,” Lê says.
No land for supporters
With the legislative, executive and judiciary bodies de facto led by the party, there is little possibility of challenging the verdicts.
Even lawyers are far from safe when it comes to defending environmental defenders.
“Most of the lawyers who are working for legal aid activities are facing threats, especially when providing legal aid to arrested individuals, particularly political prisoners,” Hưng says.
“The thing is that if they are fair trials or fair judgment, files should be accessible. Yet none of them [cases of criminalized enironmental defenders] can be found on the website of the Ministry of Justice, though the law stipulates so.”
Finding allies among the domestic public, or even from other advocacy groups, is also out of the question. “Other local NGOs have also been silent about arrests of their domestic peers,” legal advocate Hưng says.
These criminalizations go unquestioned in the context of Vietnam due to top-down smear campaigns by party mouthpieces, cybertroopers and state-affiliated journalists. The Communist Party of Vietnam holds a full monopoly on media. The 2019 National Development and Management Plan for the press until 2025 restricts the coverage of sociopolitical news to a few designated outlets. As a result, coverage of arrests and imprisonment of environmental defenders across all state-affiliated outlets is limited and identical, citing only sources from the government.
Many unsubstantiated articles on state-affiliated media outlets refer to environmental activists as being provoked and incentivized by hostile forces, without evidence.
For example, an article published in The Capital’s Defense (Quốc phòng thủ đô), the mouthpiece of the Hanoi party committee, listed organizations led by Hoàng Thị Minh Hồng (director of the environmental advocacy group CHANGE) and Đặng Đình Bách (director of a policy advocacy center, LPSD) as among groups that allegedly “create divisions in public opinion, destabilize political security and social order, undermine government agencies, seek external influences to interfere in Vietnam’s internal affairs, deliberately spread misinformation to diminish Vietnam’s reputation and credibility on the international stage.”
The fear is strongly felt among civil society.
“The crackdown is intended to decapitate the capability of private NGOs in Vietnam, channeling all foreign aid to government-controlled NGOs (especially in important fields like climate justice and community development),” Nguyễn says.
Behind the scenes, there is year-round and long-term harassment of NGO workers in the environmental fields.
Nga (not her real name), an employee in a nonprofit organization in Hồ Chí Minh City, said her team has been stressed by the consecutive arrests. Some have stepped down from leadership positions out of fear, while some others have sought employment in other sectors.
“The NGO world is very precarious. Even if we are not punished yet, it does not mean that we are right in the eyes of the government, Nga says. “It is not that we did not check what is right to avoid the wrong. It is just like we never know what is right or what is really wrong. It is really up to the whim of someone else.”
Support is needed from international actors
“Efforts to build a green and truly sustainable future and those to ensure the protection of environmental and climate defenders can seem distinct, but in fact they are intrinsically linked,” says Maureen Harris, senior adviser at International Rivers and also part of the Vietnam Climate Defenders Coalition, a group of more than 30 international and regional organizations supporting environment defenders in Vietnam.
“We are experiencing a global shift toward clean energy solutions, and pressure from civil society — from grassroots organizations to large NGOs — is pivotal in accelerating this movement,” Harris says.
Bruun says that environmental activism is a thorn in the side of the CPV due to its power to gather crowds. According to Bruun, Vietnam is folowing the footsteps of China, which in the 1990s quashed civil society due to it being seen as the vanguard of democracy.
“Environmental issues have the potential for broad and powerful organizing, and when the regime feels threatened, it cracks down,” Brunn says.
In order to continue to work for the cause, Hưng, Nga and several other NGO workers say they are considering switching their organizations’ status from nonprofit to for-profit in order to make it easier to ensure they are complying with tax laws. “There will be less challenges when the law is clearer,” Loan says.
Liangyi Chiang, Asia managing director at 350.org, a grassroots organization that promotes renewable energy, stresses the importance of educating donors on the challenges facing Vietnamese activists. “It is important to keep donors updated on the tax policies,” Chiang says. “Every single donor is different. Not all donors are aware of tax regulations’ complexity, especially rapid changes in the policies not only for civil society but also for the private sector.”
In parallel, Chiang emphasizes the importance of telling the stories of those Vietnamese defenders, celebrating activists as inspirations rather than treating their stories as cautionary tales. “We need to show donors the great jobs they [activists] did in the past. The more we do, the stronger support there will be for the activists,” Chiang says. “We make sure that their stories are to be remembered.”
By Hướng Thiện – Mongabay.com – September 3, 2024