Thursday, March 29, 2012

USCIRF 2012 Annual Report

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Originally posted at khmerkrom.net:The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) just released the 2012 Annual Report. In this report, there is a section dedicates about the “Khmer Buddhism” and mentioned that "The situation of the ethnic Khmer Buddhists has been an underreported problem in the State Department‘s Religious Freedom report."
USCIRF’s report recommends to the U.S. government to urge the Vietnamese government to "allow the banned Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam (UBCV) and the Khmer Buddhists to operate legally and independently of the official Buddhist organizations and the Vietnam Buddhist Sangha, including allowing the UBCV's Provincial Committees and Buddhist Youth Movement to organize and operate without restrictions or harassment;"

Mid-Term Implementation Assessment on Vietnam

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Originally posted at khmerkrom.net: The Universal Periodic Review (UPR) is a new mechanism of the United Nations to review all States in the world regarding to their fulfillment of human rights obligations every four years.
Vietnam had been reviewed by the Human Rights Council’s UPR Working Group in 2009. During this review, there were 172 recommendations to Vietnam.
The UPR Info organization (upr-info.org) just released the Mid-Term Implementation Assessment (MIA) on Vietnam. According to this MIA, after two years, 82% of the recommendations have not been implemented which makes Vietnam to be the worst record for a MIA.
Vietnam is well-known in promising to improve its human rights record with the world community when it begs for economic aids. Vietnam also uses this tactic when it is reviewed by the UN about its human rights obligations. Vietnam might still thinks that it is only reviewed every four years, so when it comes up to next review, Vietnam will use all kind of excuses to get away with it again. But, with the new mechanism of the UPR, the world community will not let Vietnam to get away easy if it wants to get the economic aids and doing business with.
Click on this link to read the UPR-Info’s MIA on Vietnam: http://followup.upr-info.org/session5/viet_nam/MIA-Viet_nam.pdf