U.S. Told to Pressure Vietnam on Rights
As Vietnam Looks for Trade Concessions, U.S. Should Press for Human Rights, Advocates Say
By WILLIAM C. MANN Associated Press Writer
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON – The United States should capitalize on President Bush’s upcoming visit to Vietnam to increase pressure on the communist nation to improve its human rights record, rights activists said Thursday.
With Vietnam now headed by a reformist president and negotiating for membership in the World Trade Organization, the time was ripe to prod the southeast Asian nation to build on the positive steps it has taken, such as loosening media restrictions and granting more independence to the national assembly, the activists said, addressing a panel of federal lawmakers.
Bush should use the visit to the Asian-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in November “to publicly support the Vietnamese people’s aspiration for freedom and democracy,” Chan Dang-Vu, North American representative of Viet Tan, the Vietnam Reform Party, told the Congressional Human Rights Caucus.
Vietnam faces potential milestones in opening its communist-run system this year, and is trying to cement permanent normalized trade relations with the United States as it presses its bid for WTO membership. While some gains have been made under its new president, Nguyen Minh Triet, an economic reformer, the country is backsliding in others, such as religious persecution and the freeing of political prisoners.
Last week, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, speaking in Hanoi, said the Bush administration supports the government on the trade question.
Activists cautioned about offering what could appear to be unconditional support.
Chan said Congress should “encourage the president to discuss the obvious: Vietnam’s full integration into the global community requires political liberalization in tandem with economic liberalization.”
He said that because of the recent mistreatment of Vietnamese trying to exercise religious rights, the State Department should continue to designate it as a “country of particular concern” toward the practice of religion.
T. Kumar, Amnesty International’s advocacy director for Asia and the Pacific, noted improvements regarding freedom of association.
But Kumar said his group has seen recent troubling events “including inconclusive releases of prisoners of conscience and new arrests of individuals who appear to have done nothing but use their legal right to peaceful freedom of expression.
Another witness, Helen Ngo, chairwoman of the Committee for Religious Freedom in Vietnam, said a general amnesty declared this month resulted in freedom for just one religious prisoner from a list of religious prisoners provided by the State Department pastor Ma Van Bay.
There also was testimony about a crackdown on Internet use.
The wife of Cong Thanh Do, a Vietnamese-American from San Jose, Calif., imprisoned for Internet use, testified that Do’s Vietnamese jailers will tell her and their three children nothing about his situation. Jane Tien Dobui tearfully said she does not know “even if he is still alive.”
Copyright 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
