The Vietnamese government has placed more than 170 rights activists, including their family members, under house arrest and barred them from leaving the country on “fabricated national security grounds,” a human rights group said on Thursday.
The actual number of cases is likely to be higher, given the country’s strict censorship regime and victims’ fear of publicizing their cases, it stated.
The house arrests were carried out with various methods, including stationing plainclothes security agents outside homes, gluing locks, erecting roadblocks and other physical barriers, and mobilizing neighborhood thugs to intimidate people.
The practice is “so pervasive” in the communist-ruled country that rights activists and bloggers adopted a code name for it, calling it “banh canh”; banh is a Vietnamese word for cake or noodles, while canh means either soup or to guard, the rights group said. Activists would post on social media that they were eating banh canh, implying that they were under house arrest.
While a number of victims have attempted to dispute the legality of their mistreatment in Vietnam, the rights group said that doing so is an “impossible feat” given the country’s communist-controlled judiciary.
Robertson urged the Vietnamese government to end house arrest and amend laws that restrict citizens’ basic rights to travel freely, calling on Vietnam’s donors and trade partners to “press the government to end these paralyzing practices.”
Activists and bloggers are often detained during sensitive anniversaries—including national holidays, commemorations of conflicts between Vietnam and China, and on Human Rights Day—as well as political events such as the National Assembly elections, according to the report.
They are also prohibited from meeting with visiting foreign experts from the United Nations or other organizations to discuss human rights-related issues. In some instances, activists have been forced onto a train to return to their hometowns.
HRW claimed that activists would only find out about their travel ban when authorities stopped them at airports or border gates. Those who are barred from traveling will not be informed of the duration of the travel ban.
Restrictions were also imposed during visits by former U.S Presidents Bill Clinton in 2000, Barrack Obama in 2016, and Donald Trump in November 2017, and February 2019 for the Trump-Kim Jong Un summit.
The report cited the 2016 case of activist Nguyen Quang A, who was forced into a car and driven around by security officers to prevent him from attending a meeting with Obama.
“The Vietnamese government apparently considers it a crime for some people to attend human rights or freedom of religion events, or meet with visiting foreign dignitaries,” Robertson said.
