Human Rights Report: January 2022-June 2023

On December 19, Project88 released a new report highlighting key types of human rights violations by the Vietnamese state in 2022 and early 2023 that Project88 believes, when taken together, are indicative of an intensification of repression in Vietnam.

These human rights violations include:

• The government use of arbitrary detention, surveillance, intimidation, and restriction of movement to silence activists and commit reprisals against them for participating in international advocacy.
• The targeting of NGO leaders and climate defenders with false charges of tax evasion.
• The increasing criminal prosecution of dissidents for exercising their right to free expression.
• The continued criminalization of independent journalism and denial of press freedom.
• The rampant use of pre-trial incommunicado detention and denial of right to a fair trial.
• The lack of independent investigations or access to effective remedies when political prisoners die behind bars from alleged willful medical neglect.
• The forced psychiatric treatment of political prisoners without their families’ knowledge.

This latest report was released just days after the conclusion of COP28, at which Vietnam announced its Resource Mobilization Plan for its $15.5 billion Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP) to international fanfare. However, behind closed doors, internal diplomatic documents indicate that some still feel unease over the deal, specifically Vietnam’s imprisonment of key climate defenders from 2021 to present.

Vietnam has systematically jailed environmental leaders as part of its expanded crackdown on dissent to target activists who are neither markedly pro-democracy nor anti-state. In addition to arrests and trials– which are only one part of a larger picture that must be analyzed to understand the gravity of the human rights violations reported in Vietnam– our report presents evidence of other types of persecution that suggests a turn for the worse in Vietnam’s suppression of dissent, even as arrest numbers appear to be falling.

Read Project88’s full report here.

 

© 2023 The 88 Project