11. Vietnam
Points: 11
Areas of human rights violation as identified by HRW 2016: government critics and activists; freedom of religion; criminal justice system.
Imprisonment and torture
In communist-led Vietnam, where independent political parties, labor unions, and human rights organizations are banned, there is little space for exercising rights to free speech and assembly. Human rights defenders and bloggers are imprisoned, prosecuted and physically assaulted on a regular basis. HRW reports that during the first nine months of 2015, at least 40 bloggers and rights activists were beaten by plainclothes agents.
Laws are formulated in vague terms to encompasses almost any offense, and thus serve as a mean to eliminate political opponents. Imprisoned activists often stay in prison for months, even years waiting for a trial. Human Rights Watch reports that physical abuse is regularly employed as a mean to extract confessions from people who did not commit any crime. Deaths in prisons are covered up by police and assigned to suicide.
Torture in drug detention centers
Besides prisons, abuse is commonplace in drug detention center where addicts spend years subjected to forced labor under the pretext of “therapy”. Thousands of people, including children, are held in these state-run centers, a majority of them against their will, with no chance to complain or leave the institutions. Although in 2015 the government reduced the overall number of detainees, it announced that some 15,000 people will remain in the centers until 2020. Physical punishments are part of “therapy” in cases when prisoners disobey center’s rules or fail to meet the daily quota. “If the quota was not met, you would be beaten. If you made small mistakes, 4 or 5 staff would join forces to beat you until you bled. There was no way to complain”, one of the former detainees said for International Labor Rights Forum.
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