More than 170 rights advocates have been have been put under house arrest, blocked from traveling and sometimes assaulted by agents of the Vietnamese government in a little-noticed campaign to silence its critics, a human rights group said yesterday.
The tactics to obstruct people’s movements are “often overlooked” in reporting on the communist government’s imprisonment of dissidents and other “suppression of fundamental liberties,” Human Rights Watch said in a report.
The group said that it found more than 170 people who were subject to travel bans and other pressure from 2004 to last year. They included Nguyen Tuong Thuy, 72, an army veteran who took up the cause of political prisoners.
“Security agents have harassed, intimidated, assaulted and arbitrarily detained him, and imposed house arrest and a travel ban,” the report said.
Nguyen Tuong Thuy was last year sentenced to 11 years in prison on a charge of “making, storing, disseminating or propagandizing” anti-state information, Human Rights Watch said.
The report cited his descriptions of how authorities violated the rights of other rights advocates, including being fired from jobs, evicted from rented homes, physical assaults, theft, vandalism of their homes, and interrogations and beatings inside police stations.
Vietnam has said that it is fully committed to protecting human rights, but government comment on the new report was not immediately available yesterday.
“The authorities employ rights-abusing tactics such as holding activists in indefinite house arrest, detention when away from home and bans on leaving the country under fabricated national security grounds,” Human Rights Watch Asia deputy director Phil Robertson said.
The report said that house arrest is carried out by varied methods, including hiring guards to intimidate and gluing locks, and is done pre-emptively, in anticipation of trouble, coinciding with important holidays, domestic political developments or the trials of political dissidents.
The restrictions on movement also include blocking people from traveling abroad. In addition to travel bans for activities such as attending human rights gatherings, advocates have also been blocked from taking personal trips for purposes such as tourism or accompanying a family member for medical treatment, the report said.
Vietnam has repeatedly defended its human rights record.
“Vietnam is fully committed to exerting continual efforts for better protection and promotion of human rights,” the Vietnamese government said in a UN review.
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