Day: March 7, 2023

Bleeding and apparently afflicted with uterine fibroids, Vietnamese prisoner of conscience Nguyen Thi Tam has been suffering in prison without adequate medical care, her family told Radio Free Asia.

Human rights groups have blamed her condition on horrible prison conditions and demanded her immediate release.

Tam is serving a 6-year sentence at Gia Trung Prison in the southern central province of Gia Lai for “making, storing, distributing or disseminating information, documents and items against the Socialist Republic of Vietnam” in violation of Article 117 of the penal code – a law frequently used by authorities to quiet dissent.

During a phone call on Mar. 3, Tam told her daughter Nguyen Thi Mai that she was suffering from severe bleeding and declining health and had to be sent to the Gia Lai provincial hospital on Feb. 28. She made the 50-kilometer (31-mile) journey in a box truck with no medical personnel on hand. 

“My mother said that she felt exhausted and weak as many parts of the road were bumpy while she was bleeding a lot. However, the driver refused to stop,” Mai told RFA’s Vietnamese Service. “The doctor concluded that my mother had uterine fibroids, but she was not allowed to stay at the hospital for monitoring or proper treatment.”

Tam was sent back to the prison on the same day, and she is now receiving treatment at the prison’s clinic, but the condition has left her weak to the point that she cannot even walk without the help of others.

Dong Tam commune dispute

Authorities arrested Tam and three others in June 2020 for expressing their opinions on social media about a land dispute at the Dong Tam commune that turned violent when authorities raided the commune in January of that year, leading to the deaths of three protesters and a village leader.

Tam has served prison sentences twice before in 2008 and 2014.

Conditions at the prison are difficult, Mai said. She said Tam told her that she was ordered to participate in cleaning the prison, but given no specific goal or target like other inmates, and she was “allowed” to grow vegetables for her own consumption.

Failure to participate in the prison labor would result in constant confinement in her cell and she would be denied opportunities to move around or communicate with other inmates.

Additionally, the prison’s water is unclean, so inmates are forced to buy bottled water from the prison canteen for a 500,000 dong fee (more than US$20).

RFA attempted to contact the Gia Trung Prison to verify the information but no one answered the phone. 

The London-based Amnesty International told RFA that the prison’s failure to provide proper medical treatment to Nguyen Thi Tam has made her ongoing medical problems worse.

Joe Freedman, the media manager for Amnesty International’s Southeast Asia Office, said in an email that three other prisoners of conscience had passed away because of poor or late medical treatment in Vietnamese prisons.

“Amnesty International is calling on the Vietnamese authorities to urgently provide adequate health care to Nguyen Thi Tam and to immediately and unconditionally release her and other activists imprisoned for peacefully exercising their human rights,” he said.

Translated by Anna Vu. Edited by Eugene Whong and Malcolm Foster.

Southeast Asian and Pacific leaders are hailing an ambitious United Nations treaty to protect ocean life by establishing protected areas in international waters.

Some 193 countries agreed to the legal framework on Saturday night. It comes as ocean life faces growing threats from climate change, overfishing, shipping traffic and seabed mining on the high seas.

“Only 1% of the high seas is currently protected,” Singapore’s Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan said on Twitter. This “is a timely achievement & major milestone in the conservation & sustainable use of biodiversity in our oceans. It will go a long way towards protecting our global commons.”

The treaty is a culmination of UN-facilitated talks that began in 2004. It’s also a crucial first step to meet a goal set in December at the Biodiversity COP15 in Montreal to protect 30 percent of the planet by the end of this decade in an agreement known as “30 by 30.”

Achieving this objective would have been “a fantasy” without the treaty, said marine conservation scientist Daniel Dunn, since there were no established legal processes for creating marine protected areas on the high seas. 

The treaty establishes a global framework for sharing ocean resources and managing marine ecosystems, including thorough environmental impact assessments on the potential damage of proposed commercial activities, such as deep-sea mining, before the start of such projects.

The ocean is considered crucial in the fight against the climate crisis, as ocean temperatures continue to rise and threaten marine life. Scientists say ocean ecosystems create half the oxygen humans breathe and limit global warming by absorbing much of the carbon dioxide.

Nearly 10 percent of marine species are at risk of extinction, according to an IUCN report in December, while climate change affects 41 percent of these threatened species. 

Slow, ‘eye-watering’ negotiations

For years, disagreements over funding and fishing rights have caused delays in the negotiations. 

Dunn, who has been involved with the negotiations since around 2014, said it was an “eye-wateringly slow discussion about the blindingly obvious need for better mechanisms to protect, assess, and sustainably use the half of the planet beyond the control of any one country.”

The deal was reached following a non-stop two days meeting at UN headquarters in New York.

“The ship has reached the shore,” conference Chair Rena Lee of Singapore announced on Saturday.

Official adoption will occur later at another UN session after technical editing and translations of the agreed pact. Nations then must ratify the treaty for it to take effect. 

The Philippines said it “consistently underlined the principle of common heritage of humankind & importance of giving due regard to the rights & jurisdiction of adjacent coastal States & archipelagic States, which are heavily dependent on the sea.” 

It “will provide holistic & equitable management of human activities impacting ocean life beyond national boundaries to safeguard global ocean health & contribute to climate resilience, increased food security for millions of people,” Foreign Secretary Enrique Manalo said on Twitter.

Environmental group Greenpeace called it “a monumental win for ocean protection” that “provides a pathway to creating fully or highly protected areas across the world’s oceans.”

Smaller countries lead the way

Henry Puna, the current secretary general of the Pacific Islands Forum, also applauded the agreement. 

Pacific Island nations, which occupy 20 percent of the world’s Economic Exclusive Zones, have long advocated for an international, legally binding instrument to preserve marine life in areas beyond national jurisdiction. 

Laura Meller, Oceans Campaigner for Greenpeace Nordic, said major countries, including the European Union, the United States and China “were key players in brokering the deal,” showing “willingness to compromise.” But so was a coalition of developing nations known as the Group of 77.

“Small Island States have shown leadership throughout the process, and the G77 group led the way in ensuring the treaty can be put into practice in a fair and equitable way,” Meller said.

The legally binding pact, called the Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction treaty, represents the first common framework agreement on ocean protection since the adoption of the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which established the high seas as an area where all nations can conduct fishing, shipping, and research. 

Undiscovered biodiversity

The “high seas” lies outside of any country’s jurisdiction, beginning at the border of countries’ Exclusive Economic Zones that extend up to 370 kilometers (200 nautical miles) from coastlines. It makes up more than 60 percent of the world’s oceans by surface area and is home to millions of species and ecosystems.

Currently, just 1.2 percent of these international waters, a vast reserve of undiscovered biodiversity, are protected.

Conservationists say sharing marine genetic resources derived from plants and animals in the ocean that could benefit society, including in pharmaceuticals, food, and industrial sectors, was another point of contention.

The treaty “articulates a new regime for access and benefits sharing of marine genetic resources, which have already been used to develop extremely lucrative pharmaceuticals by corporations and countries who can afford to access these deep and distant areas,” Dunn, who teaches at the University of Queensland, said in a statement.

Edited by Matt Reed and Malcolm Foster.