The US said on Friday it saw no reason to put Vietnam back on a blacklist of religious freedom violators despite a recommendation from a US human rights watchdog.
The US Commission on International Religious Freedom wrote to US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recommending the State Department reinclude Vietnam on a “country of particular concern” (CPC) blacklist.
The State Department removed Vietnam from the list in 2006.
“We did so because Vietnam has addressed the central issues that we believed constituted severe violations of religious freedom, and they continue to make improvements on those,” State Department deputy spokesman Tom Casey said.
Casey said: “There are certainly still a number of issues in terms of religious freedom in Vietnam.”
But “the actions that the Vietnamese government has taken to address some of our concerns makes them a country that does not merit being included on the CPC or the countries of particular concern list,” he said.
Vietnam was blacklisted in 2004 for failing to heed US requests to free people jailed for their religious beliefs, reopen hundreds of churches, ban the forced renunciation of faith and end general abuses of religious believers.
“And since 2004 a lot has changed,” Casey said.
“And in November 2006 we took them off the list because, among other things, they’d released a significant number of prisoners, including 45 that we had specifically raised with the government,” Casey told reporters. “They have also reopened most of the churches that had been forcibly closed, particularly in the central highlands.”
“They put forward a new legal framework on religion that banned forced renunciations of faith, which, again, was one of our considerations,” he said.
DOUBLE-MURDER CASE: The officer told the dispatcher he would check the locations of the callers, but instead headed to a pizzeria, remaining there for about an hour A New Jersey officer has been charged with misconduct after prosecutors said he did not quickly respond to and properly investigate reports of a shooting that turned out to be a double murder, instead allegedly stopping at an ATM and pizzeria. Franklin Township Police Sergeant Kevin Bollaro was the on-duty officer on the evening of Aug. 1, when police received 911 calls reporting gunshots and screaming in Pittstown, about 96km from Manhattan in central New Jersey, Hunterdon County Prosecutor Renee Robeson’s office said. However, rather than responding immediately, prosecutors said GPS data and surveillance video showed Bollaro drove about 3km
‘MOTHER’ OF THAILAND: In her glamorous heyday in the 1960s, former Thai queen Sirikit mingled with US presidents and superstars such as Elvis Presley The year-long funeral ceremony of former Thai queen Sirikit started yesterday, with grieving royalists set to salute the procession bringing her body to lie in state at Bangkok’s Grand Palace. Members of the royal family are venerated in Thailand, treated by many as semi-divine figures, and lavished with glowing media coverage and gold-adorned portraits hanging in public spaces and private homes nationwide. Sirikit, the mother of Thai King Vajiralongkorn and widow of the nation’s longest-reigning monarch, died late on Friday at the age of 93. Black-and-white tributes to the royal matriarch are being beamed onto towering digital advertizing billboards, on
Tens of thousands of people on Saturday took to the streets of Spain’s eastern city of Valencia to mark the first anniversary of floods that killed 229 people and to denounce the handling of the disaster. Demonstrators, many carrying photos of the victims, called on regional government head Carlos Mazon to resign over what they said was the slow response to one of Europe’s deadliest natural disasters in decades. “People are still really angry,” said Rosa Cerros, a 42-year-old government worker who took part with her husband and two young daughters. “Why weren’t people evacuated? Its incomprehensible,” she said. Mazon’s
POWER ABUSE WORRY: Some people warned that the broad language of the treaty could lead to overreach by authorities and enable the repression of government critics Countries signed their first UN treaty targeting cybercrime in Hanoi yesterday, despite opposition from an unlikely band of tech companies and rights groups warning of expanded state surveillance. The new global legal framework aims to bolster international cooperation to fight digital crimes, from child pornography to transnational cyberscams and money laundering. More than 60 countries signed the declaration, which means it would go into force once ratified by those states. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres described the signing as an “important milestone,” and that it was “only the beginning.” “Every day, sophisticated scams destroy families, steal migrants and drain billions of dollars from our economy...
RSS