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The European Union has spoken out against Vietnam’s arrest of human rights and labor campaigners, and environmental experts, telling a meeting of the United Nations Human Rights Council that Hanoi should free people it has locked up for exercising their basic rights.
The comments came at the 58th session of the council, known as the UNHRC, in Geneva on Monday.
“We remain deeply concerned over the arrests of human rights defenders as well as labour rights, climate and environmental experts in Vietnam, which has a chilling effect on freedom of expression, assembly and association,” said Ambassador Lotte Knudsen, the head of the European Union delegation to the U.N.
“We call on Vietnam to ensure that human rights and fundamental freedoms are protected so that civil society can participate freely in all aspects of development free of harassment, intimidation and reprisals, and to release all those imprisoned for having peacefully expressed their views.”
Knudsen also said the E.U. wanted Vietnam to suspend and eventually scrap the death penalty.
She welcomed Hanoi’s ratification of workers’ rights conventions drawn up by the U.N. International Labour Organization, but said the government should ratify the ILO’s convention on freedom of association and the right to organize. Adopting Convention 87 would create the conditions for Vietnamese workers to set up independent trades unions. Workers in Vietnam can only join one union, the state-managed General Confederation of Labor.
Vietnam announced on Dec. 12 it was standing as a candidate for re-election to the United Nations Human Rights Council for 2026-2028. It had a seat on the council in its 2014-2016 term and is a member for the 2023-2025 term.
Vietnam ‘never kept its promise’
In 2019, Europe and Vietnam signed the E.U.-Vietnam Free Trade Agreement, ratifying it the following year. The deal has helped Vietnam to become the largest Southeast Asian exporter to Europe. Last year, it had a US$35 billion trade surplus with the 27 E.U. members.
The agreement contains commitments to protect workers’ rights and land rights, and protect the environment. However, on Feb. 4, four human rights groups in Europe and the U.S. filed a complaint with the European Commission’s department of trade, accusing Vietnam of violating those commitments.
“Vietnam promised to respect human rights, respect the right to protect the environment and many other rights, but it never kept its promise,” said Vietnam Committee on Human Rights President Penelope Faulkner.
The other groups signing the agreement were the International Federation for Human Rights, Christian Solidarity Worldwide and Global Witness.
Their complaint listed some 40 cases of labor, environmental, and land rights activists imprisoned in Vietnam, including journalists Pham Chi Dung and Pham Doan Trang, and lawyer Dang Dinh Bach.
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Human Rights Watch, in a January report, said last year Vietnam “convicted on bogus charges and sentenced at least 43 rights campaigners and dissidents.”
Calls to Vietnam’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs by Radio Free Asia went unanswered. The Vietnamese government says it does not detain political prisoners and only sentences people who break the law.
Translated by RFA Vietnamese. Edited by Mike Firn.