BANGKOK: Prominent climate activist Hoang Thi Minh Hong has been released from prison in Vietnam, her husband told AFP today, a year after she was jailed for tax evasion.
Last September Hong was sentenced to three years in prison for dodging US$275,000 in taxes related to her environmental campaign group CHANGE.
She was the fifth environmentalist jailed for tax evasion, in what activists see as a campaign to silence them.
“Yesterday they released her,” her husband Hoang Vinh Nam, told AFP.
“It was very sudden.”
Nam said Hong was being held in a jail in Gia Lai, a mountainous province in Vietnam’s Central Highlands.
“She took a bus home, it took her 12 hours to reach Ho Chi Minh City and I picked her up from the bus station at 5am this morning.
“It’s just amazing. She’s good, she’s healthy and she’s the same person she was when she went in (to prison).”