Vietnam: APEC
Summit Should Highlight Rights Abuses
New Documents
Reveal Religious Repression
Human Rights Watch
November 14, 2006
(New York,
November 14, 2006) – World leaders should continue to press Vietnam on human
rights, religious freedom and political reforms when they meet in Hanoi this
week for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit, Human Rights Watch
said today.
“Vietnam’s
economic progress has rightfully earned the praise of donors,” said Sophie
Richardson, deputy director of the Asia Division of Human Rights Watch. “But
APEC delegates shouldn’t assume that those gains have translated into greater
respect for human rights.”
Despite the high-profile release on Monday of a Vietnamese-American woman
arrested for allegedly plotting to air anti-government radio broadcasts,
Vietnam’s track record on basic human rights remains abysmal, Human Rights Watch
said.
Hundreds of political prisoners remain behind bars in harsh conditions.
Dissidents who use the internet to advocate greater human rights are jailed.
Nguyen Vu Binh, 38, is serving a seven-year sentence largely in solitary
confinement for espionage after submitting written testimony about human rights
in Vietnam to the US Congress in 2002 and circulating articles critical of the
Vietnamese government on the internet. Truong Quoc Huy, 25, was detained in 2005
for more than eight months after participating in internet discussions about
democracy. He was re-arrested in an internet café on August 18, 2006. He had
reportedly expressed public support for the democracy movement.
Vietnamese workers are forbidden from organizing unions that are independent of
the government. In 2006, hundreds of thousands of workers initiated wildcat
strikes to demand independent unions, the right to bargain collectively, wage
increases, and better working conditions.
Vietnamese law also continues to ban publications that oppose the government,
and lists more than 2,000 prohibited activities in the area of culture and
information, such as revealing party secrets or circulating “harmful”
information. Internet café owners are required to monitor their customers’
internet usage to make sure they do not access sites banned by the government.
Demonstrations in front of places where government, party and international
conferences are held are illegal.
“Free markets depend on free access to information,” said Richardson. “If APEC
is aiming for equitable development and common standards, its delegates should
be pushing for the maximum – not the minimum – freedom of information across all
their members.”
Although they face state reprisals, activists are pushing ahead for reform in
Vietnam. In the past six months, more than 2,000 people from different parts of
the country have signed on to unprecedented public appeals calling for respect
of basic human rights, a multiparty political system, and freedom of religion
and political association. The government has responded with harassment;
detaining, interrogating and confiscating documents and computers from many of
the more prominent activists.
Despite the US lifting its designation of Vietnam as a “country of particular
concern” for abuses of the right to religious freedom, Buddhist monks from the
banned Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam, including its Supreme Patriarch,
Thich Huyen Quang, and second-ranking leader, Thich Quang Do, remained confined
to their monasteries. Members of ethnic minority Christian churches in the
northern and central highlands continue to be harassed and pressured to recant
their faith.
Citizen complaint petitions and an internal government training document
recently obtained by Human Rights Watch show how the Vietnamese government
continues to treat certain religions with intense suspicion, as “hostile forces”
that abuse religion to create political strife. The government document,
entitled “Training Document: Concerning the Task of the Protestant Religion in
the Northern Mountainous Region,” is available online in Vietnamese
here, along with an unofficial English translation
here.
The government training document, issued in 2006 by the government’s Central
Bureau of Religious Affairs, instructs local cadre to limit and control the
spread of Christianity among ethnic minority people in the north, calling on
them to coerce forced recantations of religion by new converts who practice
religion “irregularly” and whose faith is not yet “firmly established.” This
policy is in violation of international human rights conventions that Vietnam
has signed, as well as national legislation it enacted in 2004 in order to
address religious freedom concerns by the United States.
Petitions recently smuggled out of Vietnam describe arbitrary arrests and
ongoing persecution of ethnic minority Christians in the central highlands, as
well as difficulties for churches to register with the government. The wife of a
Christian pastor in Dak Nong province wrote that interrogation and arrest on
suspicion of plotting a demonstration or supporting the unauthorized “Dega”
religion can be sparked by communicating with friends abroad on a mobile phone,
receiving money from family overseas, or taking a sick relative to Ho Chi Minh
City for treatment. Police regularly use pressure tactics and physical violence,
she wrote in a complaint petition to local authorities obtained by Human Rights
Watch:
“As a matter of course, the investigating police beat individuals who they pick
up and use the methods of their profession to wrap up the file as soon as
possible: they play on the fears of their relatives, on their limited education,
and inadequate knowledge of Vietnamese [language]. The investigating officers
threaten, coax, make promises, and even write the confession for their relatives
to sign or do the rough draft for the person to copy and then force him to sign.
This happened to the wives of [two men], who were forced to sign confessions
before their husbands were released.”
Human Rights Watch calls on APEC delegates to publicly raise these human rights
violations with Vietnamese officials, and to press for amendments to the Labor
and Criminal Codes to strengthen protections of freedom of expression, assembly
and association. Human Rights Watch also urges APEC members to reiterate their
expectations that Vietnam will abide by its commitments as it agreed to when it
ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in 1982.
“Vietnam is on its best behavior while it’s under the international spotlight,”
said Richardson. “But what will happen after the trade deals are signed and the
APEC delegates go home? The world will be watching to see if Vietnam will
demonstrate a new tolerance for dissent and criticism, or whether it will revert
to business as usual.”