Human Rights Watch (HRW) urged the EU in a report published on Wednesday to review its dialogue with Vietnam over human rights concerns and called on the bloc to implement “more effective measures to address the Vietnamese government’s growing repression,” ahead of the EU-Vietnam human rights dialogue planned on July 4.
This isn’t the first time HRW has called for European support to uphold human rights in Vietnam. The organization released a previous call to the 27-member bloc in 2022 for measurable human rights benchmarks in Vietnam.
Before Wednesday’s report, HRW addressed a submission to the EU in May in which it enumerated alleged human rights violations committed by Vietnamese authorities. This includes violations of freedom of expression, freedom of association and freedom of religion and belief. The submission also listed a series of measures the Vietnamese government should follow to align with its obligations under international law.
In its report, HRW pointed out that the EU and Vietnam have been engaged in a human rights dialogue since 1995, following the signing of the EU-Vietnam cooperation agreement, a bilateral agreement in which Vietnam recognized for the first time a binding human rights clause in a treaty with a foreign entity. Furthermore, the bilateral cooperation between the two entities evolved with the ratification of the EU Partnership and Cooperation Agreement (PCA) in 2012 and the EU-Vietnam Free Trade Agreement (EVFTA) in 2020. The latter aims to promote trade and investment cooperation in addition to improving human rights conditions in the Asian country.
However, the report stated that the Vietnamese government increased its repressions against local activists and journalists over the years, violating its human rights commitments, and made no significant progress in the issues raised by the EU.
The report also highlighted acts perpetrated by Vietnamese authorities in recent years including the arrest of journalists for writing Internet posts that criticized the government and the arrest of environmental activists. Other restrictive measures were linked to the EVFTA when Vietnamese activists were first prevented from joining the treaty’s EU Domestic Advisory Group before getting arrested.
According to HRW, these developments are contrary to Vietnam’s commitments under its bilateral political and trade agreements with the EU. The report also added that the PCA contained a clause that “includes an institutional and legal link to the EU-Vietnam Partnership and Cooperation Agreement, allowing appropriate action in the case of serious breaches of human rights.”
On this basis and given Vietnam’s failure to comply with its human rights commitments, HRW asserted that the EU and its institutions should effectively interfere to “press” the Vietnamese government to cease its human rights violations. The NGO called on the EU to impose “targeted sanctions against those responsible for systemic human rights abuses in the country, including Vietnam’s leadership.”
The Associate EU Advocacy Director at HRW Claudio Francavilla echoed the NGO’s proposal and added that “only targeted sanctions and concrete consequences for political and trade relations will flag to Hanoi that the EU is serious about human rights.”