Vietnam sentences climate activist to 3 years in prison for tax evasion

HANOI, Vietnam (AP) — A Vietnamese climate activist was sentenced on Thursday to three years in prison on charges of tax fraud, state media reported.

Hoang Thi Minh Hong, 50, who headed the environmental advocacy group Change, which works on environment and climate issues, was also fined 100 million Vietnamese dong ($4,100) by a court in Ho Chi Minh City, the state-owned Viet Nam News reported.

She is the fifth known climate or environmental activist who has been jailed in Vietnam in the past five years.

“This conviction is a total fraud, nobody should be fooled by it,” said Ben Swanton of the human rights group The 88 Project, adding that it shows the law being weaponized to go after climate activists.

Hong was accused of evading taxes amounting to 6.7 billion Vietnamese dong ($274,702) from 2012 to 2022, state media reported citing the indictment.

The trial lasted half a day after Hong pled guilty.

In 2018, U.S. President Barack Obama described Hong as one of the young people worldwide who inspired him, and she won the Obama Foundation scholarship at Columbia University that year.

Vietnam is one of the few remaining communist single-party states that tolerate no dissent.

In 2022, Human Rights Watch said that more than 170 activists had been put under house arrest, blocked from traveling or in some cases assaulted by agents of the Vietnamese government in a little-noticed campaign to silence its critics.

On Sep. 15, Vietnam detained Ngo Thi To Nhien, the director of a think tank that works on energy issues in the country. Nhien was the sixth expert working on environmental and climate issues that authorities have taken into custody in the past two years.