April 20,2013
WASHINGTON (AP) — Human rights conditions are deteriorating in China and Vietnam but improving in Burma as it continues on its bumpy path to democracy, the U.S. said Friday.
The State Department also said in its annual assessment of human rights around the world that conditions in North Korea remain “deplorable.” The report said defectors reporting extrajudicial killings, disappearances, arbitrary detention, arrests of political prisoners and torture.
The department took aim at the continuing crackdown on political activists and public interest lawyers in China during 2012. It pointed to a “systemic” use of laws to silence dissent and punish individuals, and their relatives and associates, for attempting to exercise freedom of expression and assembly.
Authorities increased repression and restrictions on religious freedom in ethnic Tibet regions, where rising numbers of people have set themselves on fire to protest against Beijing, the report said.
The department’s conclusions typically draw a stiff response from the Chinese government, where the Communist Party monopolizes power but has overseen decades of rapid economic growth that has hoisted hundreds of millions out of poverty.
In Vietnam, another one-party state, the report said the government has attacked critical web sites and spied on, fined, arrested, and convicted dissident bloggers. The U.S. also criticized the imprisonment of dissidents using vague national security legislation, and restrictions on religious and labor rights.
The department said Burma “continued to take significant steps in a historic transition toward democracy” in 2012, with political prisoner releases, relaxing press censorship and allowing trade unions. It also staged by-elections that saw Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi take a parliamentary seat.
But it said the country’s authoritarian structure from five decades of military rule remains largely intact.
Burma also needs to work urgently to overcome deep divisions that have caused outbreaks of inter-ethnic violence, claiming at least 100 lives and displacing tens of thousands in Rakhine State in June and October. Those bloody clashes — that have spread this year to the country’s heartland — have mostly targeted minority Muslims.
In Indonesia, which has transitioned from military rule to become one of Southeast Asia’s most robust democracies, the U.S. said security forces are reporting to civilian authority.
But suppression of the rights of religious and ethnic minorities is a problem, it said. The government applied treason and blasphemy laws to limit freedom of expression by peaceful independence advocates in the provinces of Papua, West Papua and Maluku, and by religious minority groups.
The report said the government of Sri Lanka tightened its grip on power and made little meaningful effort in 2012 toward reconciliation with the Tamil minority community following the end of the country’s long civil war four years ago. Involuntary disappearances continued and the government did not account for thousands who disappeared in prior years.
The U.S. also criticized the government’s impeachment of the Supreme Court chief justice, and said persons allegedly tied to the government attacked and harassed civil society activists, journalists and purported Tamil rebel sympathizers.
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US: Human rights worsening in China, Vietnam
[Hmong] Vietnamese church leader killed in custody
Published: April 03, 2013--CathNews
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| Beaten picture of Vam Ngaij Vaj |
Photographs taken soon after the death of Vam Ngaij Vaj show “severe and bloody bruising” on his back and neck, CSW said in a statement on Tuesday.
“CSW calls on the Vietnamese government to fully investigate the circumstances in light of signs that he was tortured,” said the group’s chief executive, Mervyn Thomas.
Vaj, an elder of a church affiliated to the officially recognized Evangelical Church of Vietnam (South) and a member of the Hmong minority, was arrested for “destroying the forest” while clearing brush from his field with his wife, CSW said.
He was arrested on March 16 and died just a day later. Police claim he had accidentally put his hand into an electric socket, CSW said.
But the US Morningstar News website quoted a local Hmong leader as saying he may have been electrocuted as well as beaten.
The incident occurred in Dak Nong province in the Central Highlands and CSW said sources there report that the charge of destroying the forest is used to intimidate local Christians, many of whom fled to the area from further north to escape religious persecution.
It says it received reports last month of harassment and intimidation by local authorities and “thugs working with them.”
In another story, a Catholic Vietnamese fish farmer who became a hero for resisting compulsory land eviction has gone on trial, Radio Australia reports
Doan Van Vuon is charged with attempted murder after he and his family confronted authorities trying to evict them from their fish farm in Tien Lang district.
Mr Vuon, 50, is being tried for attempted murder with three other male relatives, who have all been in detention since the incident.
The charge carries a maximum sentence of death.
His wife and sister-in-law are being tried on a charge of resisting officers.
According to the indictment read out in court, Mr Vuon and his relatives used the homemade weapons and demonstrated "murderous behaviour" towards public officials.
"I knew the use of weapons was not in accordance with the law... my view was that the eviction was illegal so if they did not stop I would be forced to fight it," Mr Vuon said.
"We just wanted to threaten them."
He said his family did not intend to hurt anyone during the standoff but had decided to fight back to try to draw the attention of the country's leaders to their plight.
Five former local officials in the area will go on trial next Monday over the destruction of Mr Vuon's house.
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Vietnamese Blogger’s Home Targeted with Rank Liquid
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| Huynh Ngoc Tuan |
A prominent blogger said Monday that he and his family in central Vietnam have been victimized by what he believes to be agents hired by local security forces to threaten him over his online criticism against the state.
The once-imprisoned Huynh Ngoc Tuan, 50, told RFA’s Vietnamese Service that the attack occurred at 12:30 a.m. on April 4 when two assailants pulled up to his home in Quang Nam province on a motorbike and threw rank liquid near his bedroom.
“I heard the sound of a motorbike outside, which was nothing strange, but then I heard the sound of water splashing onto our steel gate … twice. Then I came out of my house because I knew something was going on,” Tuan said.
“In the light from the neighbor’s house I saw the backs of two young men. I saw that the water was thick and contained fish heads and organs, as well as some human excrement. It was overpowering,” he said.
Tuan said that he woke everyone in the house up and told his eldest daughter, Huynh Thuc Vy, to take pictures of the liquid.
“Thuc Vy ran out and when she smelled it, she threw up,” he said.
The family spent the entire night cleaning the house, Tuan said, but was unable to get rid of the stench.
“The neighbors smelled the liquid and asked what had happened and who had done it. I told them that it was probably the police that attacked our family … because they don’t like me, but have no legal basis to make me stop writing,” he said.
“We wrote essays and articles that they don’t like, so they attacked our family and harassed us … This is not the first time. They have done the same thing to other dissidents.”
Repeated harassment
Police have harassed the Huynh family at their home in Quang Nam in recent years since Tuan, a member of the government-banned Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam (UBCV), and his eldest daughter Huynh Thuc Vy began receiving attention for their blogs.
Tuan is accused by local authorities of posting articles on the Internet which “oppose the Party and State.”
According to Paris-based Vietnam Committee on Human Rights (VCHR), security agents recently threw two venomous snakes into Thuc Vy’s home as a warning to stop her blogging activities as a political and social commentator.
More recently, the group said, local police pressured the landlord of Tuan’s younger daughter Huynh Khanh Vy to expel her from her lodgings in Danang just two weeks after she had given birth. Her request for a scholarship to study in Australia was also blocked.
Less than three weeks ago, Khanh Vy told RFA’s Vietnamese Service that she and her husband had been targeted for frequent residence permit checks and had lost job opportunities because of police intervention.
In 2011, police raided the Huynh family home in Tam Ky, confiscating their computers.
The next year, after Thuc Vy went to Ho Chi Minh City to take part in an anti-China demonstration, police took her into custody and drove her back to Quang Nam, in what she said was an attempt to scare her into avoiding future protests.
After Thuc Vy and her father Tuan were each awarded an international free speech prize last year, Huynh Trong Hieu, the brother, planned to travel to pick the awards up on their behalf, but was barred from leaving Vietnam and had his passport confiscated.
Khanh Vy, Thuc Vy, and Trong Hieu, who is also a blogger, are all in their twenties.
Tuan was arrested in 1992 and sentenced to 10 years in prison for “spreading propaganda” against the one-party communist state. He was released in 2002, but remained under house arrest for the next four years.
Police surveillance and harassment is a common experience for dissident bloggers in Vietnam, which is listed by press freedom watchdog Reporters Without Borders as an “Enemy of the Internet.”
Vietnamese authorities have jailed and harassed dozens of bloggers, citizen journalists, and activists over their online writings since stepping up a crackdown on freedom of expression in recent years.
Many have been jailed under Article 88 of the Vietnamese Criminal Code for “conducting propaganda against the state,” and international rights groups and press freedom watchdogs have accused Hanoi of using the vaguely worded provision to silence dissent.
Reported by RFA’s Vietnamese Service. Written in English by Joshua Lipes.
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