Vietnam Muzzles Human Rights Activists at the United Nations

The Society for Threatened Peoples (STP) accused the United Nations on Wednesday of giving way to Vietnam’s pressure and of muzzling human rights activists. During the annual meeting of the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues the Vietnamese ambassador to the UN intervened personally at the UN and on Tuesday made sure that two films by the STP human rights activist Rebecca Sommer on the persecution of indigenous peoples in Vietnam and Laos will not be shown.

"The United Nations are losing their credibility in human rights issues if they cannot even guarantee the freedom of speech within their own UN bodies”, criticized STP. The film screenings had been registered for Tuesday and Wednesday through the organization Earth Peoples and other human rights organizations and had been approved by the UN. The films show countless eye-witness testimonies documenting the massive persecution of the Hmong in Vietnam’s partner country Laos, and the suppression of the Buddhist Khmer Krom indigenous people living in the Mekong Delta in Vietnam.

Hardly any other group in Southeast Asia has been persecuted as brutally and systematically as the Hmong groups living scattered in the jungle of Laos, explained STP. Unarmed women and children have been killed by soldiers while gathering food. Hmong refugees have given accounts of torture and rape while being held in custody by Lao security forces.

The Khmer Krom claim to be suffering from restricted freedom of religion. In the past few months dozens of their monks have been arrested arbitrarily and protests against their arrests were repressed violently.

The annual meeting of the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues is considered the most important representative institution of indigenous peoples at the UN. Directly responsible for the cancellation of the film screenings was the DESA, a UN institution in charge of non-governmental organizations. In a joint statement numerous human rights organizations protested against the decision to cancel the screenings and demanded the UN to explain its reasons for so doing. Vietnam has repeatedly pressured UN human rights bodies in order to suppress critical voices.