Trần Tố Nga, born in 1942 in Soc Trang province, was once a journalist for the Liberation News Agency.
During the years of the anti-American resistance, she participated in the fight in the South and was exposed to the toxic dioxin, also known as Agent Orange, a chemical used by the U.S. military during the war in Vietnam.
Medical examinations in France showed that she had higher-than-permitted levels of dioxin in her blood.
Nga met three conditions that allowed her, as a French-Vietnamese citizen residing in the only country with a law permitting French lawyers to file international lawsuits to protect French citizens against harm caused by another country, to take legal action against U.S. chemical companies.
Nga spent four years preparing for the trial, which took place from 2009 to 2013.
In April 2014, 19 U.S. companies, including Dow Chemical and Monsanto, were brought to court in Evry, France, to face Nga's lawsuit.
Although the Evry court rejected Nga's claim in May 2021, she asserted that she will not give up.
Between 1962 and 1971, U.S. warplanes dropped about 68 million liters of Agent Orange - named for the orange-striped barrels containing the chemical - to defoliate forests and destroy the enemy's crops.
Many Vietnamese people were exposed to dioxin as a result of this operation.
At the time, no one knew they were in contact with a toxic substance that would not only affect their own lives but also those of their descendants.
A year after being exposed to Agent Orange, in 1968, Nga gave birth to her first child, a girl with a congenital heart defect who lived for only 17 months.
It wasn't until decades later, after meeting war veterans and their disabled children, that Nga began to suspect her own child had been a victim of Agent Orange.
According to the Vietnam Association for Victims of Agent Orange/Dioxin, approximately 4.8 million Vietnamese people were directly exposed to the chemical, and more than 3 million suffer from health problems related to it.
Nga herself is affected by the toxic chemical, suffering from type 2 diabetes and cancer.
Despite this, she asserts that she does not harbor hatred towards the U.S. As a victim of Agent Orange, she understands the pain of fellow victims and strives to help them.
After her lawsuit was rejected, Nga launched a community fundraising campaign to continue her appeal, scheduled for 2024.
To date, only U.S. veterans and their allies in the Vietnam War have been compensated for the effects of Agent Orange.
In 2008, a U.S. federal appeals court upheld the decision to dismiss the civil lawsuit against major U.S. chemical companies filed by numerous Vietnamese plaintiffs./.
