More than 50 Goldman environmental prize laureates from 41 countries have written to the UN human rights council as it considers admitting Vietnam as a new member.
In the letter, which comes as the council meets for its 51st session (12 September – 7 October), the prize winners raise concerns over Vietnam’s human rights record, in particular the sentencing in June of Nguy Thi Khanh, a fellow Goldman prize winner and Vietnam’s best-known environmental advocate, to two years’ imprisonment for alleged tax evasion.
“As Goldman prize winners, we have all faced uphill battles in our efforts to protect our planet and catalyse change,” the letter says. “What’s happening in Vietnam is just the tip of the iceberg.
“We urge you to use this as an opportunity to demonstrate not only to Vietnam, but to all countries, that the criteria for obtaining an esteemed membership on the human rights council are taken seriously, and that the international community is watching.”
Khanh became Vietnam’s first recipient of the prestigious Goldman environmental prize in 2018. She is the founder of the Green Innovation and Development Centre, which has campaigned for the south-east Asian country to adopt greener energy strategies, putting her at odds with the country’s apparent ambitions to boost coal production.
She has also worked closely with the Vietnamese government by outlining strategies to help the country achieve its ambitious climate goals, such as those embraced last November when the prime minister, Pham Minh Chinh, committed the country to achieving net-zero emissions by 2050 at the Cop26 climate change conference in Glasgow.
Michael Sutton, director of the Goldman environmental prize, said: “We join the international community in calling for the immediate release of Goldman prize winner Nguy Thi Khanh from detention in Vietnam. We believe that the legal charges levelled against her are part of a wider effort to silence environmental leaders in Vietnam.”
Khanh is not the only Vietnamese environmental advocate sentenced to prison terms on tax-related charges. In January, an environmental lawyer, Dang Dinh Bach, was sentenced to five years in prison for tax evasion, having worked to protect marginalised communities from coal power plant pollution, while the journalist Mai Phan Loi also received a four-year prison term for tax fraud.
The arrests – of Khanh in particular – have alarmed Vietnam’s civil society community, unsettling the country’s environmentalist organisations, which fear their work on environmental issues such as Vietnam’s clean-energy transition could lead to criminal prosecution.
It is understood that Khanh has filed a request for an appeal with prison authorities and is awaiting a reply, having been routinely denied access to her lawyer.
The UN human rights council has been criticised in the past for admitting countries with controversial human rights records, including Saudi Arabia and China, which are described by Human Rights Watch as “two of the world’s most abusive governments”.
Vietnam is regularly criticised over its human rights record by organisations such as Amnesty International, which said in a December 2020 report that Vietnam was detaining a record 170 prisoners of conscience.
