It’s been a year since Vietnam was elected to the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Council, following intense lobbying aimed at overcoming criticism of its poor human rights record. On joining the Council, the one-party state pledged to ‘continue the efforts devoted to better enjoyment of human rights and fundamental freedoms’.

But it didn’t mean it. The already dire state of civic freedoms in Vietnam has continued to worsen. The government threatens, harasses, arrests, criminalises and imprisons activists. It continues to tighten control of online space. And it’s increasing pressure on the hundreds that languish in its prisons, serving long sentences for actions that shouldn’t be considered crimes. A growing number of those jailed are environmental activists who, not long ago, the state was prepared to tolerate – and in some cases worked with.

Green targets

The latest is Hoang Thi Minh Hong, founder of the now dissolved Center of Hands-on Actions and Networking for Growth and Environment (CHANGE). Alongside her husband and two CHANGE staff members, Hoang was arrested in May and charged with tax evasion under article 200 of the 2015 Criminal Code. On 28 September, she was sentenced to three years in prison and a fine of 100 million dong (approx. US$4,100).

Hoang is at least the seventh environmental rights defender to have been arbitrarily imprisoned on bogus tax evasion charges, a favoured tactic of a state that doesn’t want to look like it’s criminalising environmental activism. The same accusations had been used against Mai Phan Lợi, Ngụy Thị Khanh, Duong Hung Bach, Dang Dinh Bach, Hoàng Ngọc Giao and Hoàng Thị Minh Hồng.

Mai Phan Lợi is the former editor-in-chief of Phap Luat, a prominent state-run magazine focused on legal issues, and an executive board member of the Vietnamese NGOs on the European Union (EU)-Vietnam Free Trade Agreement (EVFTA). This is a group of seven community organisations established in November 2021 to satisfy the agreement’s requirement to form a civil society Domestic Advisory Group (DAG) as part of its EU deal. He was sentenced to four years.

Ngụy Thị Khanh, founder of the Green Innovation and Development Centre, was jailed for two years when her campaign for the adoption of renewable energies placed her at odds with the government’s ambition to boost Vietnam’s coal production. She was granted early release in May 2023.

Đặng Đình Bách, director of the Center for Legal Studies and Policy for Sustainable Development, was sentenced to five years in January 2021. He was well-known for amplifying the voices of marginalised communities suffering harm as a result of coal power plants. Prior to his arrest, he’d asked to engage with the government to monitor the implementation of EVFTA.

In June 2023, Đặng declared his intention to go on a hunger strike. In August he was assaulted by police, and he also told his family he’d been threatened by other inmates. This was far from an exception: imprisoned activists in Vietnam face poor detention conditions, denial of medical care and family visits, solitary confinement, ill-treatment and torture in custody – with some dying as a result.

Other articles of the Criminal Code frequently used against civil society activists, including those mobilising for environmental rights, are article 109, which punishes ‘aiming to overthrow the people’s administration’, article 117 against ‘making, storing or disseminating information, documents, materials and items against the Socialist Republic of Vietnam’ and article 331 on ‘abusing democratic freedoms and conducting propaganda against the state’.

In June 2019, for instance, environmental activist and blogger Nguyễn Ngọc Ánh was sentenced to six years in prison for Facebook posts and live broadcasts critical of the state. Nguyễn had taken part in environmental protests against a toxic spill from the Taiwan-owned Formosa Plastics Group’s steel plant that led to an ecological disaster in the central costal region in April 2016.

In December 2021, Phạm Đoan Trang was sentenced to nine years in prison for the content of several of her published works on environmental and human rights issues, and for two interviews she gave to the BBC and Radio Free Asia.

Most recently, in September 2023, green energy expert Ngo Thi To Nhien was detained and could face charges of ‘appropriating documents of agencies and organisations’. A former researcher for the World Bank and US donor agency USAID, Ngo is the executive director of the Vietnam Initiative for Energy Transition, an independent think tank studying the phasing out of fossil fuels.

Closure by design

The Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) controls all public affairs. Severe restrictions weigh on the establishment and operation of independent civil society organisations (CSOs), labour unions and political parties. Instead, people are directed to work within established, CPV-controlled mass organisations, usually under the aegis of the Vietnam Fatherland Front.

Independent groups are denied registration, while activists working with non-registered groups are routinely arrested and convicted for doing so. In the last three months alone, activists have been convicted for advocating for the formation of an opposition party, investigating corruption, distributing information, circulating a petition and expressing their opinions on social media.

In July 2023, Phan Son Tung was sentenced to six years in jail for urging the formation of an opposition party, the Prosperous Vietnam Party. He’d been arrested in August 2022 on ‘anti-state propaganda’ charges. According to the indictment, he created and managed three YouTube channels and a Facebook page where he posted around 1,000 video clips, gaining more than half a million followers and over 148 million views. He was accused of disseminating ‘fabricated and confusion-creating content’ and content that ‘distorted, slandered or insulted the prestige of organisations or the honour and dignity of individuals’, and of ‘promoting psychological warfare’.

Also in July, Nguyen Son Lo, former director of the Southeast and North Asia Institute of Research and Development, was sentenced to three years in prison for ‘abusing democratic freedoms’ and to another two years for ‘abusing official position while conducting government business’. He was accused of distributing documents and complaints containing content that ‘infringes upon the interests of the state and the legitimate rights of other organisations and individuals’. In the same month, three members of the Khmer Krom minority group were arrested in the Mekong Delta region. Their alleged crime was handing out copies of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, for which they were charged with ‘abusing democratic freedoms’.

Another found to have abused his scant democratic freedoms is Hoang Van Luan. Since 2018, Hoang had led several petition drives. In August 2023, he was arrested after the official People’s Police Newspaper ran a photo of him and other petitioners who urged authorities to complete a promised water supply project in the Vung Ang Economic Zone, the site of the devastating 2016 waste spill.

The repressive arm of the Vietnamese state is long, as attested by the abduction by Vietnamese security agents of exiled blogger and YouTuber Duong Van Thai, who went missing in Bangkok, Thailand, in April 2023. Only in August did the Vietnamese state acknowledge he was in their custody. He was charged with creating ‘propaganda against the state’.

Expression as a crime

The state controls all print, broadcast, online and electronic media, and private ownership or operation of any media outlet is prohibited. A 2016 Press Law makes clear the instrumentalisation of the media: it states that the duties of the press are ‘to propagandise, disseminate and contribute to the building and protection of Party guidelines and State policies and laws’.

The publication and distribution of unauthorised books is severely penalised. In an infamous 2019 case, over 100 people were harassed for having either bought or read books printed by an independent publisher. A man caught distributing the books was sentenced to six and a half years in prison.

Online freedom of expression is severely restricted. A 2013 decree limits the use of blogs and social media to ‘providing or exchanging personal information’ and prohibits them being used to share news or information from government sites. The law also bans content that could be ‘harmful’ to national security or that opposes the government. Additionally, the Cybersecurity Law in force since 2019 allows the authorities to compel technology companies to hand over potentially vast amounts of data, including personal information, and to censor users’ posts. It also allows them to treat basically any form of expression as a crime, as it bans the posting of material that ‘offends the nation, the national flag, the national emblem, the national anthem, great people, leaders, notable people, and national heroes’.

A 2020 decree criminalises ‘fake news’. Fines were increased to up to US$9,000 and a possible 12-month suspension for journalists, newspapers and online media publishing information deemed to be false that causes ‘extremely serious consequence’, is ‘not suitable to the interests of the country and the people’, or is ‘distorted, fabricated or causing confusion among people’. The decree also imposed fines of between US$6,500 and US$9,000 for a long list of infractions.

When dissent threatens to erupt or inconvenient news spreads, the authorities rapidly deploy cyber troopers who flood Facebook with reports complaining about users’ social media activity. Media outlets are routinely instructed to remove news coverage. In April 2023, for example, the authorities ordered the removal of news about the death of literary critic and poet Đặng Tiến, a member of a literary organisation the government claimed was anti-communist.

Plans were recently reported to further tighten restrictions on social media platforms, forcing them to remove ‘misinformation’ and ‘false news’ within 24 hours of requests being lodged by the authorities and to block ‘illegal livestreams’ within three hours. Companies not meeting these deadlines could see their platforms banned.

Vietnamese prisons overflow with people serving sentences for expressing opinions critical of corruption and one-party rule and in favour of democracy and human rights, often through Facebook posts and broadcasts. They include democracy activist Nguyễn Quốc Đức Vượng, sentenced to eight years in 2020, Đinh Thị Thu Thủy, an aquaculture expert critical of the Formosa environmental disaster, sentenced to seven years after a four-hour trial in 2021, and Y Wô Niê, an ethnic Ede Montagnard minority rights activist who was sentenced to four years in 2022.

These are just a few of a very long list. Vietnam is a world leader in jailing online critics.

Why now?

Environmental activists are the latest target of tactics once reserved for activists calling for civil and political freedoms, campaigning against corruption and for accountability, and defending the rights of ethnic and religious minorities.

Until not long ago, environmental activism was not only considered unthreatening – it was even viewed as aligned with state interests. In 2019, a Friends of the Earth officer visiting Vietnam met environmental activist Ngụy Thị Khanh as she laboriously built bridges with government officials and industry leaders to protect communities from coal pollution. Her efforts pushed the state to develop wind and solar power and commit to go net zero by 2050 at the COP26 climate summit. But three years later, Nguy is behind bars, along with several other leaders of the Vietnamese climate change movement. Something had changed.

In part, the wave of attacks on environmental activists shows that anyone who questions the absolute power of the CPV and state is liable to corrective and exemplary punishment. And in part it’s about the rising power of the global climate movement, the gap between Vietnam’s climate commitments and its coal-powered industrialisation drive, and the signing of international partnerships with Vietnam that could open up scrutiny but further drive the state’s determination to control narratives and resources.

It isn’t only EVFTA that’s revealed these tensions. In December 2022, a group of nine rich industrialised nations – the G7 plus Denmark and Norway – approved a deal to transfer US$15.5 billion to Vietnam. The funding, coming from public and private sources through loans, grants and investment, is meant to help the country move faster from coal power to renewable energies to reach net zero by 2050, consistent with Vietnamese and global commitments under the Paris Agreement. This was the third Just Energy Transition Partnership negotiated, following one signed with South Africa in 2021 and another with Indonesia earlier in 2022.

Having secured the funding, the Vietnamese government doesn’t want anything to do with civil society. Involving it in the process would mean accepting things the totalitarian state finds deeply unpalatable: pluralism, dissent and accountability.

Vietnam however faces only weak pressure from its international partners, prepared to downplay human rights concerns in their quest to build alliances with states that might offer some regional counterbalance to China. The USA provides another example: during President Biden’s recent visit, it upgraded its partnership with Vietnam, and human rights were barely mentioned.

Vietnam’s climate partners need to realise that any energy transition, and particularly a just transition, is impossible without civil society. In a year in which Vietnam has recorded its highest-ever temperatures, the need for civil society’s innovation, pressure and scrutiny to help the country meet it climate commitments is more evident than ever.

Just Energy Transition partners must use the multibillion-dollar leverage at their disposal to demand the inclusion of the voices that can put the country on track to net zero. And for that to happen, those voices must first be freed – and given guarantees they won’t end up in jail again the next time they don’t see eye to eye with the government.