Vietnam
human rights bill approved by House
Baptist Press
Posted on Aug 5, 2013
WASHINGTON - The U.S.
House of Representatives has approved nearly unanimously a bill designed to
advance religious freedom and other human rights in Vietnam.
In a 405-3 roll call Aug. 1, the House approved the Vietnam Human Rights Act,
H.R. 1897, which will prohibit any increase in non-humanitarian U.S. aid to the
Southeast Asian country if its government does not make significant progress in
promoting human rights. The Senate has yet to act on the proposal.
Among its goals, the bill seeks to end religious abuses and return confiscated
property to churches and religious communities.
The legislation also expresses the sense of Congress that the State Department
should re-designate Vietnam as a "country of particular concern," a
classification reserved for the world's worst violators of religious freedom.
The bill's purpose is "to send a clear, strong, and compelling message to the
increasingly repressive communist regime in power in Vietnam that says that the
United States is serious about combating human rights abuse" in that country,
said Rep. Chris Smith, R.-N.J., in a written statement. Smith is the bill's
House sponsor.
Protestants, Catholics, Buddhists and adherents of other faiths face government
abuse, Smith said. Government officials have jailed journalists and have been
complicit in human trafficking, Smith said.
The House-approved bill says the Vietnamese government "continues to limit the
freedom of religion, restrict the operations of independent religious
organizations, and persecute believers whose religious activities the Government
regards as a potential threat to its monopoly on power."
According to the legislation, "unregistered ethnic minority Protestant
congregations, particularly Montagnards in the Central and Northwest Highlands,
suffer severe abuses because of actions by the Government of Vietnam, which have
included forced renunciations of faith, arrest and harassment, the withholding
of social programs provided for the general population, confiscation and
destruction of property, subjection to severe beatings, and reported deaths."
The only representatives to vote against the bill were Republicans Paul Broun of
Georgia and Walter Jones of North Carolina, as well as Democrat Gregory Meeks of
New York.
The House vote followed by a week a July 25 state visit to Washington by
Vietnamese President Truong Tan Sang. In a joint news conference, President
Obama said they "had a very candid conversation about both the progress Vietnam
has made and the challenges that remain."
In a statement released later, the White House noted "narrow differences"
between the two countries on the issue of human rights, but a statement in Nhan
Dan, the official newspaper of Vietnam's Communist Party, claimed the
differences were "many and significant."
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Compiled by Baptist Press Washington bureau chief Tom Strode. Get Baptist Press
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