Assessing Vietnam's Political and Religious Freedom Scorecard

Human rights — chiefly political as well as religious freedoms — have been on the actual American agenda since Washington and Hanoi resumed direct conversation about a quarter of a hundred years ago. Though bilateral ties have grown vastly broader, US prodding upon civil liberties still piques Vietnam’s one-party regime. Scepticism that Vietnam might live up to labour rights guarantees was prominent in the US discussion over the pending Trans-Pacific Partnership industry pact. The Obama administration has was adamant that the US embargo on the sale of lethal weapons in order to Vietnam will not lift until there’s ‘significant progress’ on human rights.

In the absence of spectacular lightening on civil liberties by Hanoi, the Americans are unlikely to shelve their criticism regardless of how close US–Vietnam ties may become within other respects. With some justification, Hanoi can complain that Washington holds it, among America’utes friends, to a uniquely high standard. There is a subjective component at work here: Vietnam’s intolerance of domestic dissent is a significant impediment to the resolution of America’s Vietnam War trauma. Americans would like their former foes to become like America. If, such as Germany and Japan, the actual Vietnamese become exemplary world people, the sting of beat eases, the spilt blood and treasure somehow justified.

Eighteen months ago, a US diplomat within Hanoi gave me a wallet-sized summary of American human rights objectives. The United States, the credit card said, ‘supports a strong, profitable and independent Vietnam that encourages human rights and the rule of law’. It listed five ‘prisoners of concern’ (only one continues to be in goal; two gone to live in the United States).

The card also listed a number of specific objectives. Included in this is one that Hanoi must wish it did not agree to, the July 2014 visit of UN Human Rights Commission’s Special Rapporteur upon Religion, Heiner Bielefeldt. Someone, perhaps in the Foreign Ministry, did heavy lifting to get Bielefeldt’s mission approved. It went badly. In several towns, internal security personnel bothered the believers that Bielefeldt had arranged to meet. Furious, the actual special rapporteur aborted his mission and filed a damning report.

Was the fiasco the result of ruin by die-hard ideologues? Was it just a bungle traceable to some lack of coordination between center and province, or celebration commission and ministry? Alternatively, was it evidence of the regime’s basic aversion to values that the West asserts are universal?

In Might, for the 19th time, American and Vietnamese officials discussed Hanoi’utes performance in the sphere of human rights. By some company accounts, the bilateral dialogue has become more cordial in recent years: ‘US authorities describe the two-way discussion to be more straightforward …. Vietnamese officials, directed to progress being made on human rights, call on the united states side to show more patience’.

The Americans, aiming to leverage Hanoi’s eager interest in escaping the middle earnings trap, press the notion that political pluralism and proliferation of municipal society institutions are essential fundamentals of a just and prosperous society. These are thoughts that resonate with the 61 upon the market Communist Party members who, last year, published an open appeal to current leaders. To the extent, that online advocacy is a reliable index; they also resonate along with politically aware Vietnamese who are not party members.

Apparently, the American officials do not press for specific change. Modification of Vietnam’s criminal code is not among the nine summary sentences on the US summary mentioned. They say nothing about Post 258, which prohibits citizens from abusing democratic freedoms to infringe around the interests of the state; Post 79, which prohibits activities aimed at ‘overthrowing the people’s administration’; or even Article 88, which criminalises ‘propaganda’ against the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Nor, for that matter, can there be anything on the card regarding free elections or multiple parties.

Hanoi listens politely, because it knows that stonewalling would jeopardise things it really wants: access to US markets, All of us support in international discussion boards, American defence technology and knowhow and backup towards an overly aggressive China. That’utes common sense. But within Vietnam’utes regime, there is no discernible constituency for that sorts of rights featured in the annual US political as well as religious rights reports. Insufficient news to the contrary suggests that in its dialogue with the United States, Hanoi has not volunteered much, save the expulsion of an occasional incarcerated dissident.

The Vietnamese party-state in general is simply not interested in according it’s citizens absolute political rights, particularly not the right to arrange outside the orbit of the Communist Party or to advocate anything they please. Though it has become perceptibly more sensitive to internet-enabled community opinion and seems tacitly to have accorded more ‘space’ to municipal society, the Hanoi regime is actually dead-set against reforms that would dilute the political monopoly of the Communist Celebration.

Yet, Hanoi recognises that evolution is important; successful participation in the global economy does require institutional transparency, formal limits on the physical exercise of arbitrary power as well as an efficient and predictable judicial system. These are attributes that give confidence to foreign traders and to homegrown entrepreneurs. Thus for the last quarter of a hundred years, Vietnam has been striving to adapt the ideological underpinnings of the Communist regime, a concept of ‘socialist law’ based on a Leninist Russian model, to suit its current goal of blending successfully into a global, capitalist economic system.

That quest has led to a muddle of legislation that welds concepts and rules appropriate to some growing economy and widening world-view to what’s left of the Marxist-Leninist ideology. Hanoi aims to overhaul its laws so that its citizens — and prospective international investors — understand clearly what is permissible and what is not. Its experts have consulted broadly, and ultimately Vietnam’s legal code may reflect influences through eight or ten countries. On political rights, nevertheless, it is not hard to escape the final outcome that the Vietnamese party-state’s model is not the United States or other pluralist democracies, nor is this China. It is Singapore, the city-state that has perfected ‘authoritarian legalism’.

There are thoughtful Vietnamese that argue that authoritarianism is not an inevitable finish. They hope to persuade the actual regime that sustaining it’s legitimacy, and hence its hold on power, requires politics reform, a sort of Vietnamese perestroika. If many citizens know their constitutional rights and constantly assert them, they say, the regime will have no choice but to repair its shortcomings.

The regime is wary of such talk. Party ideologues warn against the Eastern European color revolution scenario that toppled communist regimes in Prague, Warsaw, Budapest, Belgrade and elsewhere.

As also happened in Singapore, there has been substantial expansion of individual liberties as well as the civil society sphere in Vietnam in recent years. This evolution is attributable not so much to party-state initiative as to its forbearance, grounded within recognition that tight curbs on travel, association, use of information and permissible speech are incompatible with an effectively functioning market economy. Still missing in Vietnam, however, is the internal discipline that makes the actual Singapore regime unique.

On human legal rights, US and Vietnam still speaking past each other is republished along with permission from East Asia Forum