Government criticised in first independent report on Formosa disaster
The Vietnamese government has been accused of a slow response, and a lack of transparency and accountability, in the first independent report into the environmental disaster that killed millions of fish off the central coast earlier this year. The report by the unregistered civil society organisation, Green Trees, also concluded that Vietnam remained vulnerable to similar disasters because of weak regulation and water management. Green Trees came to prominence in the spring of 2015 when it helped force a climb-down by the Hanoi city administration over plans to cut down the thousands of the city’s old trees. The report, “An Overview of the Marine Life Disaster in Vietnam”, was published in secret amidst growing public anger over the state’s slow response to the disaster and growing police repression in the affected areas. The report covers a large range of topics, from a timeline of the disaster to a profile of Formosa, the Taiwanese corporation that took responsibility for the toxic leak. It also assessed the role of civil society and the performance of the government.
