Press Release on May 10, 1998

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Delegations from over 11 Vietnamese-American communities across the U.S. have arrived in Washington to launch the Human Rights for Vietnam Campaign which will run from May 11 to 13. The delegations will meet with over 50 congressional members and officials from the State Department and National Security Council to appeal for the review of the Jackson-Vanik Waiver and human rights conditions in Vietnam and support for pending congressional bills imposing sanctions against countries, including Vietnam, with abysmal records of human rights violations and religious persecution.

This nationwide campaign is largely in response to President Clinton's decision last March granting the Jackson-Vanik Waiver for Vietnam which allows the U.S. to extend numerous trade benefits to this communist regime in disregard of the country's human rights conditions and restrictions imposed by the Jackson-Vanik Amendment. There are currently two congressional bills, HR 3158 & 3159, which if passed, would nullify the Administration's waiving decision and prohibit such waiver until there is concrete improvement in human rights and free emigration in Vietnam. The Jackson-Vanik Waiver will come up for review by Congress in June of this year.

The delegations will ask Congress and the Clinton Administration to rescind the Jackson-Vanik Waiver and to support one of the pending bills, H.R. 2431, also known as the "Freedom from Religious Persecution Act of 1998", which prohibits granting economic benefits to countries which still imprison or persecute religious leaders. The delegations plan to present lists of over 160 Vietnamese religious clergy and a dozen most prominent political dissidents still being imprisoned by the Vietnamese government. There are currently over 1,000 verified cases of political dissidents being detained or imprisoned in Vietnam based on their political beliefs or activities.

Immediately following the waiver of Jackson-Vanik Amendment last March, Vietnam blatantly reduced its cooperation in the Resettlement Opportunity for Vietnamese Returnees Program (ROVR), which was the main justification for the Clinton Administration's waiver. "This is the normal behavior of the Vietnamese government in dealing with the U.S., which always end up holding the short end of the bargain, " members from the campaign said.

The focus of this campaign is to ensure that the U.S. will link economic benefits to Vietnam with the Vietnamese government's improving its human rights records and respecting its citizens' rights to free emigration, especially those of special interests to the U.S.