Expanding religious controls
Vietnam, under one-party communist rule, is expanding control over all religious activities and severely restricts independent religious practice and represses individuals and religious groups it views as challenging its authority, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedoms (USCIRF) said in a report this year.
“The Vietnamese government uses a specialized religious police force and vague national security laws to suppress independent Buddhist, Protestant, Hoa Hao, and Cao Dai activities, and seeks to stop the growth of ethnic minority Protestantism and Catholicism via discrimination, violence and forced renunciations of their faith,” it said.
Catholic churches in the country face strict government regulations.
In January, a Vietnamese court convicted 14 activists, including Catholics, of plotting to overthrow the government in a decision condemned by rights groups.
Many of the convicted were affiliated with Catholic Redemptorist churches in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, which have been part of a growing voice among Vietnamese movements for democracy and human rights in recent years.
The USCIRF has proposed that Vietnam be returned to a State Department list of the world’s worst violators of religious freedoms.
The State Department included Vietnam on its list of Countries of Particular Concern (CPC) in 2004 but removed it from the blacklist two years later and has since ignored repeated calls by the commission to reinstate the country’s designation.