Legal Initiatives for VIETNAM co-founder Trinh Huu Long is cited in the CID Faculty Working Paper- Rescinding Economic Incentives; Reversing Pro-labour Reforms.
- Title: Incentivising Pro-Labour Reforms
- Publish Date: March 1, 2019
- Publisher: Center for International Development at Harvard University
Excerpt:
If the EU don’t demand it, the Vietnam Government will just leave it there… The right approach is for international partners to be very loud, very aggressive, while local partners are quietly supportive. If the EU is soft and local partners are loud, it is counter-productive and very dangerous for us.
CPV’s new leadership (which actually precedes Resolution #6) is now keen to centralise control. It no longer has TPP’s strong economic incentive to do otherwise. Since the demise of TPP, Vietnam joined China’s Belt and Road initiative (re-affirming geopolitical and economic ties with China), and passed several laws punishing dissent. The 2018 CyberSecurity Law is very similar to China’s: authorising the removal of seditious expression; mandating service providers disclose user data to authorities (Trinh, 2017). In July 2017, the Information and Communications Minister reported that ‘Google and Facebook had removed 3,367 clips with bad and poisonous content after being requested to do so by the Ministry of Information and Communications. Facebook removed more than 600 accounts that have violating content’. The Government has also mobilised over 10’000 online propagandists (just as in China). In June 2018, people were arrested for demonstrating against the draft law on special economic zones. Independent activists and bloggers are harassed, intimidated, assaulted, and detained (Human Rights Watch, 2019).
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