HANOI (Reuters) - A senior U.S. diplomat told Vietnamese officials on Monday he was concerned human rights issues could impede the development of bilateral economic and trade ties.
There may be "implications" for the growing economic relationship between the former foes if human rights and labour issues are not managed properly, Robert Hormats, Under Secretary of State for Economic, Energy and Agricultural Affairs, told reporters without elaborating.
Letter to President Obama in regards to Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung Visit
Loretta Sanchez, Joseph Cao, Zoe Lofgren & Daneil Lungren, Members of Congress
April 13, 2010
The Honorable Barack Obama
The President
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, DC 20500
Dear President Obama:
As a President who has demonstrated strong determination to restore honor to democracy, we would like to express our serious concerns regarding ongoing human rights violations in Vietnam. As you are aware, Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung will visit Washington, D.C., for the Global Nuclear Security Summit, and we strongly urge you to take this opportunity to convey our serious concerns about Vietnam’s ongoing religious and human rights violations and take a meaningful step to help advance religious freedom and related human rights in Vietnam.
In its March 2009 Human Rights Report, the U.S. Department of State provided the following findings in regards to Vietnam:
For all of China’s economic achievements, the heyday of its entrepreneurs lies more than 20 years in the past. Renewing that era’s rural capitalism would yield more balanced growth and go a long way toward reducing today’s trade tensions.
Most people take it for granted that today’s rising tensions between the United States and China over trade and the value of the yuan will be resolved (or not) in the corridors of central banks and finance agencies in Beijing and Washington. It is far more likely, however, that the solutions will be found hundreds of miles from Beijing— in the scattered villages and small towns of rural provinces such as Hunan, Sichuan, and Guangxi.
Vietnam is flirting with a significant downgrade in foreign perception of its potential and prospects. But not all the news is bad at a time when the world economy is picking up and foreign investors are looking to diversify away from an over-hyped China.
Vietnam currently has two perception problems which are seen as linked, albeit indirectly, to next year's Communist Party Congress and the change in leadership that will bring. The first is that loose fiscal and monetary policy driven by a desire to maintain economic growth of 6 percent at all costs is re-igniting inflation, weakening the currency and weakening Vietnam's credit standing. Rating agency Fitch last month put Vietnam on negative watch, suggesting that it could be downgraded from an already none too appealing BB-. It cited inflation and a two-step decline which saw the dong fall 7 percent between November and February and the black market rate indicates fears of further falls.
Press Release
Office of Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez
47th District, California
www.house.gov/sanchez
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Caroline Hogan
April 13, 2010
Phone: (202) 225-2965
VIETNAMESE GOVERNMENT DENIES REP. LORETTA SANCHEZ VISA
Congresswoman barred from Vietnam while conducting security, human trafficking tour of Southeast Asia
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez (CA-47), Co-Chair of the Congressional Caucus on Vietnam, today announced that her visa application was ignored by Vietnam’s government. Rep. Sanchez, who just concluded a Congressional Delegation visit throughout critical parts of Southeast Asia, had hoped to meet with Vietnamese human rights activists and other officials during her trip. Rep. Sanchez has been blocked from visiting the Communist country multiple times during her time in Congress.
HANOI—Vietnam has rejected accusations by Internet giant Google that Vietnamese computer users have been spied on and political blogs hacked into.
The US-based firm last week said infected machines had been used both to spy on their owners as well as to attack blogs containing messages of political dissent.
"These are groundless opinions," Nguyen Phuong Nga, spokeswoman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told AFP.
The attacks have been focused solely on Yahoo! email accounts
blogging on to my Yahoo email account this week, I was greeted with the message: "We've detected an issue with your account." My inquiries appeared to reveal that this was part of a sophisticated and co-ordinated hacking campaign against journalists, academics and rights activists based in China, or dealing with the China story elsewhere.
For decades, various Chinese officials and outsiders have reassured the world that the country’s Communist Party leadership eventually planned to open up its one-party political system. The regime would undertake major political reforms and liberalization, it was said, to accompany the economic reforms launched by Deng Xiaoping in the late ’70s. It was merely a question of choosing the right time. Writing in Foreign Affairs two years ago, John L. Thornton, the chairman of the Brookings Institution, who has extensive high-level contacts in Beijing, reported that a senior Communist Party official told him “the debate in China is no longer about whether to have democracy ... but about when and how.”
STATEMENT OF TESTIMONY
Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission (TLHRC)
Hearing: Human Rights and Religious Freedom in Vietnam
Binh Nguyen, M.D.
Founding Chair, International Protection for Prisoners of Conscience
RECOMMENDATIONS :
1. The US Congress shall pass resolutions such as the Vietnam Human Rights Act 2009 (S. 1159 and H.R. 1969)
2. The US State Department shall put Vietnam back on the Countries of Particular Concern in the annual report on International Religious Freedom as well as Tier 3 in accordance with the annual Trafficking In Person Report.
3. Regarding any negotiations with VN on present and future bilateral trade agreement or financial support, human rights must be an integral part of any agreement. To urge for semi-annual US-VN bilateral human rights dialogue with bilateral reports on specific measures and implementation of human rights protection, to be overseen by both the US State Department and the US Congress
STATEMENT OF TESTIMONY
Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission (TLHRC)
Hearing: Human Rights and Religious Freedom in Vietnam
By
Binh Nguyen, M.D.
Dear Honorable Co-Chairmen Frank Wolf and James McGovern, Members of the TLHRC, Members of Congress:
Thank you for the opportunity to testify today, March 24, 2010 in Congress on the subject of prisoners of conscience in Vietnam. With your permission, I would like to resubmit my testimonies from previous congressional hearing on May 14, 2008 and April 1, 2009 for records. In addition, there is a list of the prisoners of conscience and political prisoners to be submitted for records as well.
Thank you very much for inviting me to participate in this hearing. I am honored to provide you information related to current violations of freedom of information in Vietnam, particularly, the internet.
I would like to begin my testimony with the story of my brother, Dr, Nguyen Dan Que, a prominent human rights advocate in Vietnam. Seven years ago, in the evening of March 17, 2003, Dr. Que was surfing the internet in Saigon café. Suddenly, an un-uniformed policeman grabbed him, choked his neck, and carried him away. At the same time, the forces of the Vietnam State Security Service raided his house and confiscated his writings and communications equipment. Dr. Que was arrested because he simply disagreed with remarks made by a Vietnamese Foreign Ministry spokesman, who claimed that freedom of information is guaranteed in Vietnam based on the facts that Vietnam has nearly 600 newspapers and magazines and the majority of people have access to the radio and television.
Dr. Que spoke publicly, but peacefully, against the spokesman's statements, saying that the government has failed to disprove the fact that all these publications, radio, and TV stations are in the hands of the state, and none are independent. The Vietnamese government kept Dr. Que incognito for 15 months. Finally, on July 29, 2004, they brought him to trial, and sentenced him to 30 months in prison for the charge of spreading anti-government propaganda and endangering state security. My brother has committed no crime. He was merely exercising his right to information which is clearly mentioned under Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations.
Opinion
Google does good; Viewpoint: Washington Post:
The Hamilton Spectator
26 March 2010
It's not often that a major multinational corporation sacrifices profits and the possibility of substantial growth for a human rights principle.
So Google deserves praise for its groundbreaking decision to move its China-based search engine from the mainland to Hong Kong and end its censorship of searches.
In the past few years, there has been a lot of dispute on the issue of democracy. To distinguish the wrongs from the rights of these arguments, we need to clarify what really is democracy. There are a lot of books and articles pontificating about democracy during the old Greek and Roman times. Then there comes the agonizing: too bad these democracies were destroyed by dictatorship. The democracy we want today, is the kind of democracy where everyone could participate.
Human Rights and Religious Freedom in Vietnam
2-4 p.m.
Tuesday, March 23
B-318 Rayburn HOB
Despite the recent release of famed religious and political dissident, Father Ly, the human rights situation in Vietnam remains bleak. The State Department’s Human Rights Report on Vietnam for 2009 states that “during the year the government increased its suppression of dissent” and “the government severely restricted freedom of association.”
A Vietnamese human rights activist and Catholic priest who was temporarily allowed to leave detention yesterday should be unconditionally and permanently released, Amnesty International urged today.
Father Nguyen Van Ly, who is serving an eight year jail term for spreading “propaganda” against the state in 2007, was yesterday released for a period of 12 months on humanitarian grounds to receive medical treatment.
Ly, 63, has already served three years in prison. He is one of the founders of the internet-based pro-democracy movement “Bloc 8406” and participated in banned political groups.
HANOI, Vietnam — Vietnam released one of its leading democracy activists from prison Monday after the dissident Catholic priest spent three years and suffered two strokes in solitary confinement, his lawyer and sister said.
Authorities released Father Nguyen Van Ly from a prison near Hanoi at 4 a.m. and drove him in an ambulance back to his hometown of Hue, his sister, Nguyen Thi Hieu, told The Associated Press.
"I'm very glad to see him out of prison and pleased to see that he is in better health than he was when I last saw him," Hieu said.
In a report released today to coincide with its World Day Against Cyber Censorship, the RSF said that in the face of an increasingly Orwellian approach to e-liberty citizens were mobilising themselves, using tools like USB flashdrives to spread and share news. But that is almost the only ray of light in the damning report.
This ability to share news and information, they said, was incredibly important, and harked back to the days of the old dissidents of the Soviet bloc. "The new media, and particularly social networks, have given populations' collaborative tools with which they can change the social order. Young people have taken them by storm. Facebook has become the rallying point for activists prevented from demonstrating in the streets. One simple video on Youtube - Neda in Iran or the Saffron march of the monks in Burma - can help to expose government abuses to the entire world", said the group in a statement. One simple USB flashdrive can be all it takes to disseminate news - as in Cuba, where they have become the local 'samizdats'."
Dharamsala, March 10: Exiled Tibetan leader His Holiness the Dalai Lama paid homage and offered prayers to Tibetan martyrs here Wednesday as Tibetan exiles and their supporters around the world marked the 51st Anniversary of the Tibetan National Uprising in 1959 and the second anniversary of the March 2008 unrests in Tibet.
“On this occasion, I pay homage to those heroic Tibetan men and women, who sacrificed their lives for the cause of Tibet, and pray for an early end to the sufferings of those still oppressed in Tibet,” the Dalai Lama said in his address marking the two anniversaries at an official function here this morning.
China-US ties strained like never before
By Benjamin A Shobert
WASHINGTON - In hindsight, Wednesday's United States House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs hearing over "The Google Predicament" may well prove to be one of the many grains of sand which are slowly eroding the conventional logic that has kept America and China engaged for most of the past several decades.
On the whole, the testimony and congressional statements appear to suggest we are fast approaching a rebalancing act between the two countries. Such a moment might change little in the way of formal policies and promulgated laws, but it will have significant impact on the politics and philosophies of engagement between Beijing and Washington.
Reporters Without Borders condemns the way the authorities are treating human rights lawyer and blogger Le Thi Cong Nhan, who was detained for three hours yesterday, just three days after she was released on completing a three-year jail sentence.
Police took her to a Hanoi police station for allegedly violating the terms of the supplementary sentence of three years of house arrest that she is now supposed to serve. Some sources said their real reason for detaining her was to prevent her from meeting a foreign journalist.
Home > RFD News
