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Vietnam barred all three of the country’s delegates from attending a U.S. meeting on religious freedom, stark evidence, activists said, of how little it values its commitment to freedom of worship.
The two-day International Religious Freedom Summit, organized by dozens of non-governmental organizations, began on Monday in Washington.
On Jan. 28, two officials of the Cao Dai religious movement, Nguyen Xuan Mai and Nguyen Ngoc Dien, were barred from leaving the country on their way to the U.S. conference when they tried to fly out of Ho Chi Minh City..
Cao Dai draws from the teachings of Buddha and Jesus Christ. The 1926 Pure Cao Dai group, which one of the delegates belonged to, is not part of the Cao Dai group established by the government in 1997 and is not recognized as a legitimate religious organization in Vietnam.
Vietnamese authorities cited national security concerns for refusing to allow the two to leave, as they did when barring Thich Nhat Phuoc of the Unified Buddhist Sangha from leaving two days earlier. The monk’s religious order is not registered with the government, a legal requirement in Vietnam.
Thich Nhat Phuoc told Radio Free Asia that the government did not allow him to attend the U.S. conference to talk about the government’s destruction of the Son Linh Pagoda in Kon Tum province when he was abbot there.
“The Vietnamese government has blocked all three victim-witnesses of religious persecution from joining the IRF Summit, which highlights the repressive environment faced by non-state-sanctioned religions and religious communities as they practice their faith,” said summit co-organizer and president of human rights group Boat People SOS Thang Nguyen.
“We will make sure that the international community takes appropriate actions in response.”
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More than 30 Vietnamese religious activists living outside the country are taking part in the summit, which has attracted more than 1,000 delegates from around the world, including more than 40 parliamentarians and 71 international civil society organizations.
Nguyen Dinh Thang, the chairman of Boat People SOS said he wanted the conference to pay attention to the state of repression in Vietnam.
“We have two main expectations. First, to make Vietnam a central issue at this international conference,” he told RFA.
“Second is to lobby the U.S. government ... to apply sanctions against Vietnamese officials who are behind the serious, systematic and long-term repression.”
Minority rights
Activist Vang Seo Gia of the Hmong Human Rights Coalition, who resettled in the United States last year, attended the religious conference with the goal of speaking out about the plight of ethnic minority Hmong people in Vietnam.
“About 100,000 Hmong people are currently stateless. They have lived for nearly 30 years without any identification documents,” he said.
“We came here to lobby the U.S. government to let them know about the stateless Hmong people and work with the Vietnamese government to help these Hmong people claim their right to citizenship.”
Y Phic Hdok is a founding member of Montagnards Stand For Justice, which fights for religious freedom and human rights of indigenous peoples in Vietnam’s Central Highlands. He said the group would speak at the religious summit about prisoners of conscience like one of the group’s founding members, Y Quynh Bdap.
He is being held in Thailand and faces being sent back to Vietnam to serve a 10-year prison sentence for “terrorism” for which he was convicted in absentia despite protesting his innocence. Y Quynh Bdap is planning to appeal against deportation.
RFA emailed the Vietnamese Ministry of Foreign Affairs with a request for comment on the opinions of Vietnamese activists at the conference but did not receive a response.
Translated by RFA Vietnamese. Edited by Mike Firn.