Parliamentary Joint Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade
24/02/2012
Australia's human rights dialogues with China and Vietnam
DANG, Ms Thuy, Vice-President, Internal Affairs, Victoria Chapter, Bloc 8406 Freedom and Democracy for Vietnam
KIM-SONG, Dr Le, Member, Bloc 8406 Freedom and Democracy for Vietnam
NGUYEN, Mr Chau Xuan, Vice-President, External Affairs, Victoria Chapter, Bloc 8406 Freedom and Democracy for Vietnam
NGUYEN, Mr Duy Quang, President, Bloc 8406 Freedom and Democracy for Vietnam
PHAM, Mr Ahn Tuan, Member, Bloc 8406 Freedom and Democracy for Vietnam
TRAN, Mr Dong, Member, Bloc 8406 Freedom and Democracy for Vietnam
[11:38]
CHAIR: Welcome.
Mr D Nguyen : I would like to thank you for your invitation. We will give you a brief with regard to Vietnam and further discuss the matter.
Ms Dang : Before the main statement of my colleagues, I take this opportunity on behalf of Bloc 8406 to thank the Human Rights Committee for inviting us to this hearing. I would also like to raise our concerns about the detention of Father Nguyen Van Le who is one of our bloc founders. He has been on a hunger strike from 29 January this year. He has refused any medical treatment to protest against the communist government jailing him for another five years. This has been a major concern for political and human rights groups in Australia and the USA for many years. But the world has failed to force the communist government to move to improve the situation. Human rights in Vietnam is not like the communist government declares, but is getting worse every day.
I believe having all the evidence of the people who are being abused by the communist government is one of the keys for the human rights bilateral dialogue. Therefore I would like to add three recent serious cases to our submission. The first case is Ms Hang thi Minh Bui who has been jailed without trial for two years in the re-education camp for participating in peaceful protest against China for invading Vietnam and killing Vietnamese fishermen. She is now on her second hunger strike to protest against unfair sentences by the communist government. The second case is Viet Khang who was jailed for expressing his patriotic feelings in composing and performing on YouTube his two songs, Who are you and Where is Vietnam. A petition was created in the US for Viet Khang and other prisoners of concern and has reached more than 61,000 signatures within two weeks. It is such a trend that President Obama will have an open dialogue with a group of Vietnamese-Americans about this case on 5 March and in the parliament on 6 March. The third case is blogger Nguyen Van Hai who wrote on his blog to protest against the Chinese invasion. He has been in jail for two years now. Although his family has tried to submit over 20 complaint letters to the Prime Minister's office, the court and police, no-one has informed them whether he is still alive or dead.
For half a century, the Vietnamese communist government has been notorious for violating all types of agreements. It does not have a habit of carrying out what has been pledged or promised. That is why all the dialogue with Vietnam has not proved any good outcomes. We of Bloc 8406 greatly appreciate all the efforts of the parliament in searching for a suitable pathway to improve the effectiveness of the dialogue. Thank you very much for your kind support.
Mr C Nguyen : We thank you for giving us the opportunity to have our voice heard. As you can see in our submission, we are here today to discuss how Bloc 8406 could contribute to the process of improving the outcome of the future dialogues between Vietnam and Australia. To that end we summarise eight points. We propose some actions as follows. No. 1 is to form a working committee between the department, the Vietnamese community and the relevant NGOs. No. 2, is pre-dialogue meetings to be held between the working committees and the Australian delegation involved, so that we can update what is happening on the current issues and progress on the ground before we go to the dialogue. No.3 is possible strategies we can propose to deal with the Vietnamese in the dialogue. On No. 3, if at all possible we would like to be able to at least have a Vietnamese community observer in the dialogue itself. No. 4, again, after the dialogue we should have a post-dialogue meeting so the working committee—that is, including us—to gather all the information so we can have our group of people to check our Vietnamese on the ground.
With respect to No. 5, for the above four items to be satisfied, that means the secrecy agreement, if any, between the Australian and Vietnamese, has to include us—you cannot keep us a secret if we are sitting at the table! No. 6 is that the overseas aid items should always be tied to the human rights progress, and we propose that there is absolutely no aid to be given without human rights conditions attached. No. 7, the consular or related visits are to be agreed, if and when the need arises, from our point of view—not from their point of view—and our 8406 people in major cities in Vietnam could be part of the participating teams in visiting these prisoners of conscience. No. 8 is that we propose the setting up of a restricted-access website where we can put on all the latest information about what is happening, any violations of any sort—and that would be restricted to a few members at your end and a few members at our end. Obviously, this would only happen every now and again, so to follow up we would send an email to the relevant person to say that there is some documentation on the website and people could just log on and have a look. That finishes our submission, and we welcome any questions from the panel.
CHAIR: I am just interested: there seems to be a common theme from most of the groups today about the visiting of prisoners and their families. What is your understanding of the activity of our embassy with regard to this matter?
Mr C Nguyen : I understand that our embassy is very far behind the American embassy in that regard. The American embassy sends either the consul or the highest-ranking officials possible to see people, together with their relatives, and that gives a lot of spirit for the prisoners and for the rest of the community. As far as I know, on the Australian side, there are no visits happening as such—there may well be.
CHAIR: There was a visit by a state parliamentarian, wasn't there—Luke Donellan?
Mr C Nguyen : Yes, Luke went over there. He went and saw Father Ly and Father Loi. I am not sure whether you could categorise him as an embassy person—
CHAIR: No, he is not an embassy person, but he is an official person.
Mr C Nguyen : Yes, okay.
CHAIR: So, in summary, you feel that there is very low-level activity by DFAT?
Mr C Nguyen : Correct.
Mr RUDDOCK: Can I ask about Bloc 8406? What is it? We have members. I have read all the stuff about how you have been recruited and you have people arrested. I see 'Father' and I ask myself: is this an Opus Dei movement or something like that?
Dr Kim-Song : I can probably answer this question. Bloc 8406 was formed on 8 April 2006. Initially 118 people joined.
Mr RUDDOCK: What is the issue that drove them?
Dr Kim-Song : The issue is that they do not agree with the current ruling party.
Mr RUDDOCK: This is the first time in Vietnam we have had a people who do not agree with the political party in power!
Mr C Nguyen : It is the first time that they were brave enough to form a group.
Mr RUDDOCK: I do not know what the name suggests.
Mr D Nguyen : Bloc 8406—democracy and freedom—tells you something about our main objective. We tried to get together. It was the first time in Vietnam there was a group of over 100 people joined together to try to fight for freedom and democracy in Vietnam and to ask for a free, elected government. We formed it and got together. We are the victims. Father Ly and Mr Anh Kim Tran has been put in jail—
Mr RUDDOCK: Yes, I know about them. That is why I am asking whether it is a Catholic organisation.
Mr D Nguyen : No, I am not a Catholic.
Mr RUDDOCK: So I am asking what drove people on 8 April 2006 for the first time to have this political organisation. What drove it?
Ms Dang : They wanted human rights for Vietnam.
Mr RUDDOCK: What drove it? There must be some impetus. The father had a revelation overnight? God said, 'Go and do it'? I do not know.
Mr C Nguyen : What happened is the voice of dissent was always rumbling well before that. Father Ly is one of the father figures, so to speak. He has the courage to muster the mass of at least 100 people brave enough. In 2006, there was no democracy. There were no human rights. There were violations everywhere.
Mr RUDDOCK: I know. I belonged to the International Committee for a Free Vietnam back in the 1980s.
Mr D Nguyen : That organisation was outside Vietnam. This was the first group formed in Vietnam. Our members come from very different backgrounds. When it formed in Vietnam it extended overseas.
Mr C Nguyen : Did we address the question or not really?
Mr RUDDOCK: I am always looking at what is driving something. What is the impetus for it? I said before the father might have had a revelation at night—God came to him and said, 'Start a revolution.'
Mr C Nguyen : You said you were part of the free Vietnam movement when I was talking before. Those organisations can only form outside Vietnam. This was the first time that one got together in Vietnam basically to directly challenge the authorities and say that we should have the right to gather together and voice opinions. From then on it just took off. We were only allowed to be a bloc, not a political party, because it is a single-party state.
Mr RUDDOCK: So you had 118 people inside Vietnam when you started. Now there are how many?
Mr D Nguyen : Maybe thousands.
Mr RUDDOCK: And you have 28 or 29 people who were in prison and 19 arrested and released. So those 29 are still in prison?
Mr D Nguyen : It is still 25. We have about 30 others in house arrest. Mr Hai Nam Do is one of them. The communist police stay in front of his house and follow him at every step.
Mr RUDDOCK: So the government sees your organisation, even though it has only been operating for about six years, as a major threat.
Mr C Nguyen : Yes, but they cannot put it down as such because we are not directly challenging the government. We are not proposing to overthrow the government; we are just crying for freedom and democracy within their so-called laws. So they struggle to hassle us.
Mr RUDDOCK: So on what basis were the people actually imprisoned?
Mr C Nguyen : Basically putting banners in the bridges.
Mr RUDDOCK: But it was under these provisions that we heard about earlier that, if you expressed critical views of the regime, you were committing an offence.
Mr C Nguyen : Yes, but the 'critical' term is very loose. There is a person who was against the dividing boundaries between Vietnam and China. The Vietnamese communists basically gave away a whole chunk of it—10,000 square kilometres of seas and a few thousand kilometres of land on the border. She was writing protesting letters and getting nowhere, so one day—she is a teacher—she said, 'I'm protesting at home, sitting.' And they came and arrested her and jailed her for five or six years. She is still in prison now.
Mr RUDDOCK: For sitting at home.
Mr C Nguyen : For a single person sitting at home and protesting.
Mr D Nguyen : We are actually very worried about her case because, like Father Ly, she is really sick.
Mr C Nguyen : The irony is she was protesting the loss of Spratly and the other islands. At the time, any mention of that would land you in jail. While she was in prison in June this year, people started to have street protests week by week. It happened over 13 times. According to our Western standard, the government have to go back to her and say: 'We're sorry we jailed you before. Now we allow these people to voice that, so we'll release you.' She is still there. It is terrible.
Dr Kim-Song : If we look at the country at a macro level we can see the Communist Party of Vietnam will not accept any challenge against its authority. Any person who is critical of the regime will somehow be put in jail at some stage in their life. They always invoke two well-known articles of the criminal code: article 88, propaganda against the government; and article 79, attempting to overthrow the government. In one case a 23-year-old university student was accused of activity aimed at overthrowing the government. That is ridiculous. How could a 23-year-old student organise such a thing?
Mr RUDDOCK: So you think the first thing I should ask when I go to a dialogue with Vietnam is when they are going to repeal these articles?
Mr C Nguyen : Yes.
Dr Kim-Song : Yes, that is what we are thinking of.
Mr C Nguyen : Or a very clear definition of what you call 'against the state'. Is writing a song a thing against the state? I will add to Dr Song's argument. The 'critical' term is a standard that is getting lower every day. When you write articles or publish on a blog, then you are critical of the government. Then it scales down. If you are face to face with an official and say, 'Your government is no good,' then you are critical of the government. It lands you in jail. Now it has got to the point that a 23-year-old musician with a wife and four-year-old kid can write two songs. One song is 'I Love Vietnam'. It is telling people that we lost the two islands.
CHAIR: Are you saying that 10 years ago that would not have happened? That is one of the things the committee has some difficulty with.
Mr C Nguyen : What would not have happened? Do you mean the jailing?
CHAIR: That if someone had written those lyrics 10 years ago, are you saying they would not be arrested? If you are saying it is going down to this level, I thought for a moment you meant chronologically. But do you mean that there are activities that low that attract government intervention? You are not saying that it has worsened in the last few years?
Mr C Nguyen : They had the iron fist before, so there was no murmuring of anything against the government of any sort whatsoever. Once you opened your mouth, you were a suspicious person and that was it. You had no chance. But lately people keep voicing and going to jail, and people voice more. Because we raise our standard, they lower their standard.
Back to what I was saying. He had two songs. He wrote one song, 'I Love Vietnam', about loving protecting the boundaries of Vietnam. In the other song he is questioning the police brutality on the 13th consecutive demonstration that I was talking to you about. For those two he was jailed and now is awaiting trial. Like my colleague said before, the Vietnamese-American total population of 1.5 million people just started a petition. The petition is supposed to be 25,000 within one month, but in the first 10 days it exceeded 25,000. Before I came here it was at 62,000 signatures. President Obama invited a group of Vietnamese to come see him. He got the audio and beamed them and the song—subtitled in English—right across the world. That will make a big dent in the issues. Obama cannot say: 'Hey, you've progressed on democracy. Now we're not going to intervene.' He has to intervene now.
Mr D Nguyen : To directly answer your question: 10 years ago we did not have any dialogue with the Vietnamese communists. Now we have a dialogue but do not believe it has improved at all. Indeed, from our point of view there is still violence.
Mr RUDDOCK: Is there anything we could do that would improve it more?
Mr C Nguyen : Just follow what we said there.
Dr Kim-Song : I understand that the main purpose of this hearing is to find out how the Australian government can improve the effectiveness of the dialogue process with Vietnam. Correct me if I am wrong.
Mr RUDDOCK: Yes, but these were improvements to the dialogue, not something else you could do that would improve it more.
Mr C Nguyen : Oh, I thought you were just improving on the process, not what was happening on the ground.
Mr RUDDOCK: I was asking you because you were critical of the dialogues. I was asking if there was anything else we could do that would be more effective than having the dialogues.
Mr C Nguyen : That is another thing. We do not know what is happening in the dialogue itself because we are supposed to be confidential. We do not know what is being said. We only have press releases, and the press releases are very poor.
Mr A Pham : I have two quick points here. The first is that we could improve the freedom of speech and press in Vietnam so that we can gather the information from Vietnam and present it to the Australian government to improve the situation. The second is that we could establish a human rights ombudsman in Vietnam. That position would overlook the situation in Vietnam and report back to the Australian government. That would be very helpful.
Mr D Nguyen : I have another thing. I think we should look more outside that dialogue. Vietnam is a small country. China is a big country. We can put more pressure on the Vietnamese communists with defence and trade ties. In America they are already making defence and trade ties, and I think it will be much improved for human rights, freedom and democracy for Vietnam. When all of us come here, we think more about Australia. We are Australian citizens, so we think that if Vietnam is a free country then it will be of much more benefit for Australia overall and for our community as well.
Mr C Nguyen : Are you gentlemen aware that America is using the web and technologies to force Vietnam to look at human rights issues.
CHAIR: Can you explain?
Mr C Nguyen : Vietnam is now drifting away from China—
Mr RUDDOCK: And they need American weapons.
Mr C Nguyen : That is it.
Mr RUDDOCK: As part of the bargaining America is saying, 'Open up a little.'
Mr C Nguyen : Well said. The four senators, including McCain and Lieberman, went over there and talked to the Vietnamese. They went out and said, 'No human rights improvements; no weapons.' It was black and white—no ifs and buts. That is the way you have deal with them.
Mr RUDDOCK: So you can only get there on human rights by us bludgeoning them.
Mr C Nguyen : That's it. Not physically!
Mr D Nguyen : It worked in Burma, so we hope it will work in the case of Vietnam.
Mr Tran : Are you in on the dialogue, Philip?
Mr RUDDOCK: I take too big a hammer!
Mr DANBY: When he goes to Vietnam he sings the Peter, Paul and Mary song:
If I had a hammer
I'd hammer in the morning
I'd hammer in the evening
All over this land
Dr Kim-Song : I have several points regarding the effectiveness of the dialogue process. I refer to the terms of reference that raise a number of areas that we need to look at—for example, parliamentary participation, oversight and so on. I think this is quite important. In our view, parliamentary participation is of paramount importance to the effectiveness of the dialogue process between Australia and Vietnam. We found that involving whoever in dealing with the human rights issues in Vietnam will not encourage them to the level expected by the Australian parliament. If we could have a permanent presence of Australian parliamentarians in the human rights delegation to Vietnam, that should help improve the process. That is the first point I would like to make.
You also refer to the involvement of non-government organisations as well. This is also very important for the dialogue process. By strengthening the position of NGOs in the dialogue process, I believe we can in the long term influence the Vietnamese government. The Australian government can put more pressure on the Vietnamese government to respect people's human rights.
I think we can also cooperate with other human rights organisations around the world—for example, Human Rights Watch, which is a very important organisation as far as human rights are concerned. If we could form an international coalition for human rights, that would be even more effective. We would be telling the Vietnamese government: 'Here you are. The international community is very concerned about the human rights situation in your country.' So I think the involvement on non-government organisations is quite important.
There are also the roles and obligations of participating agencies. We believe that this has to be seriously assessed as well. I understand that Australia started the Human Rights Technical Cooperation program back in 2005. But we understand that program is not that effective. It is not targeting the major issues of human rights.
Mr C Nguyen : That is an understatement.
Dr Kim-Song : More specifically, it is not targeting freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, demonstrations and so on. Those are the areas that we need to be concerned with. I happen to have read some media released by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. I believe they are very diplomatic, to put it that way, and not effective at all. They are not informative. I have also browsed some of the department's annual report. Not much has been said about the human rights situation in Vietnam. I think this situation is not helping. So we need to look at reporting requirements and mechanisms as well. I think it would help if the department could release an annual report on human rights similar to the one published by the United States. Or at least the department could have provided a supplement in its annual report on human rights In this way I think the public will benefit and, thus, will force the Vietnamese side to focus more on the human rights issue.
Mr DANBY: Chair, is the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade mandated? Do we request? Is there any regular section in their annual report on human rights situations like the production of the US Department of State?
CHAIR: I do not think we have a production like that.
Mr RUDDOCK: I do not think there would be anything like that. They would report on their activities, which means they report on the dialogues where they have been. They would not report on other countries and their human rights processes.
Mr DANBY: But is that something we could theoretically do? Could we have an annual report on human rights in our region or in the world?
CHAIR: We can certainly take the idea on board.
Mr D Nguyen : We have attached the American document in our papers.
Mr DANBY: We are aware of it. We see them for various countries.
Mr D Nguyen : When we prepared for this hearing, we were really upset—not for us but for you. It seemed that the department lacked communication to the parliament.
Mr C Nguyen : I will add some things. You know that the Vietnamese, when they go to report on the progress on the dialogue, tell lies. The thing the Australian department can find out is where and how they lied and publicise it for the Vietnamese community.
Mr RUDDOCK: One more mischievous question.
Mr C Nguyen : Fire.
Mr RUDDOCK: I hear a lot about Asian culture—that it is very different from Australia, that we practise something called 'megaphone diplomacy' and that, if you practise megaphone diplomacy with Asian governments, you will be singularly ineffective.
Mr C Nguyen : No. Engagement does not work. We all know that; that is why we are here.
Mr RUDDOCK: You do not think there is a cultural argument that it is impossible to get them to change by lecturing from abroad and on high?
Mr C Nguyen : No, we just do whatever we think fits, not whatever they think fits, because all they do is keep everything under wraps.
CHAIR: We have to look at the effects. It is an important point in life.
Mr C Nguyen : The thing is they try to keep it all under wraps.
Mr RUDDOCK: So there is no such cultural factor about megaphone diplomacy?
Mr C Nguyen : No. It is the culture of the communist nation. They hide everything. You know about the corruption. They hide it all. They do not publicise it. Everybody will know, so they hide it. Now they find all the state governments are running out of money.
Mr DANBY: I want you to develop a bit more the arms and human rights connection that you say the US has. Do you envisage the situation with relations between Vietnam and China as getting worse? And do you think that will lead to an opening up of the Vietnamese regime? Are there 'good' elements in the Communist Party of Vietnam? There used to be in the former Soviet Union and it is often valuable to coalesce and work with good elements of communist regimes—including on human rights. What is your reaction to that?
Mr C Nguyen : The first reaction is that you are talking about arms for human rights?
Mr DANBY: Strategic relations between Vietnam, China and the United States.
Mr C Nguyen : We believe that Vietnam and China are drifting apart. Not very quickly—not as quickly as we would like—but they are drifting apart. Therefore, the Vietnamese are now waiting and relying on American weapons and technologies at least to have a deterrent from a sudden attack, so to speak. As far as the good elements in the government of Vietnam—
Mr DANBY: I did not say 'in the government', I said 'in the Communist Party'.
Mr C Nguyen : Okay. Good elements in the Communist Party in Vietnam: we have been speculating, but all the signals are very confusing. Basically, we do not trust any of them.
Mr DANBY: So there is no Mr Gorbachev in Vietnam?
Mr C Nguyen : No, I do not think so.
Mr D Nguyen : We have not seen a very strong signal about that. But as I told you before, if we try hard to boost them then Vietnam—and Burma will be similar situation—in that way we hope it will happen. If we try hard.
Mr C Nguyen : If the economy collapses that is more likely to be the case than like Gorbachev.
Mr DANBY: In Vietnam?
Mr C Nguyen : Yes. Inflation is very high—
Mr D Nguyen : Another thing is that Vietnam and Australia have a very, very good relationship and trust. Even before that, in 1975 and after—
Mr DANBY: But that is a good excuse for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade to say, 'See, we are doing the right thing. Don't mention human rights. We have good relations with Vietnam and we will help bring them out of the communist orbit. This is the way to do it, without confronting them.'
Mr D Nguyen : But like before, after dialogue it has still not improved.
CHAIR: Thank you very much for your attendance. We have a very tight schedule and we have had to bring forward some witnesses this afternoon. You will be sent a copy of the transcript of evidence to which you can make corrections of grammar and fact. It has been a very useful presentation today—thank you for some of your ideas and suggestions.
Mr D Nguyen : Thank you very much and we hope the inquiry will be very successful.
Mr RUDDOCK: I am going to watch out for Block 8406—fascinating.
Pr oceedings suspended from 12:22 to 13:01
