CSW concerned over removal of Vietnam from US religious freedom blacklist
Christian Solidarity Worldwide
14/11/2006
Christian
Solidarity Worldwide (CSW) today expressed grave concern at the removal of
Vietnam from the US State Department’s list of Countries of Particular Concern
(CPC) for severe violations of religious freedom, published yesterday. However,
CSW welcomed the addition of Uzbekistan to the list.
CSW yesterday released a leaked Vietnamese government document which formally
mandates and instructs local officials to force members of less well-established
Protestant congregations in the northern highlands to surrender their faith and
return to their ‘traditional beliefs’. One of the central objectives of the
document is to ‘resolutely subdue the abnormally rapid and spontaneous
development of the Protestant religion’.
US Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom John V. Hanford
announced the 2006 list yesterday. The State Department re-designated Burma,
China, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Eritrea, Iran, Saudi Arabia
and Sudan as CPCs and added Uzbekistan. The US Commission on International
Religious Freedom (USCIRF) had recommended that Turkmenistan and Pakistan were
designated as CPCs, but these were not included on the final list.
In his speech, Ambassador Hanford applauded the ‘successes achieved’ in Vietnam.
However, some commentators have suggested that the decision has been influenced
by those who wish to avoid jeopardising the burgeoning trade relations between
the US and Vietnam, and therefore does not accurately reflect the state of
religious freedom in the country.
Christian Solidarity Worldwide’s Chief Executive, Mervyn Thomas, said, “We are
deeply disappointed that Vietnam has not been re-designated as a Country of
Particular Concern. The improvements cited are insufficiently great to justify
the removal of Vietnam from the list. The State Department applauded the
development of a legislative framework on religion, but this framework is
fraught with inconsistencies and contradictions, and contains wide loopholes
which have often been exploited by local officials. It also commended the work
being done to register new congregations, but although this is true for some
areas, many ethnic minority Protestants congregations have faced a new wave of
persecution when attempting to register. If the Vietnamese government document
released by CSW yesterday does not demonstrate government complicity in
particularly severe violations of religious freedom, thereby warranting
particular concern, it is difficult to see what might.
“We welcome the addition of Uzbekistan to the list and the recognition by the US
government that Uzbekistan’s human rights and religious freedom record continues
to deteriorate. However, we were disappointed to see that Turkmenistan has yet
again been excluded from the CPC list despite repeated recommendations by the
USCIRF and human rights organisations. Although the government does not have a
record of mass arrests on the scale of Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan is a repressive
regime where even official religious groups face constant harassment and
systematic repression.
“Likewise, we are concerned that USCIRF’s calls for Pakistan to be included on
the list have not been heeded, despite the grave religious freedom violations
taking place in the country, and we hope this will not result in these
violations being overlooked”.
NOTES TO EDITORS
1 Apart from
Afghanistan and Iraq where the religious freedom situations changed because of
the fall of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, respectively, Vietnam is the first
ever country to be taken off the CPC list.