WASHINGTON (CN) - On the eve of Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc's visit to the White House next week, members of Congress called Thursday for President Donald Trump to speak out against deteriorating human-rights conditions in Vietnam.
Nguyen and Trump are expected to discuss regional cooperation and bilateral relations, but experts testifying before the House this afternoon said it is past due for officials to condemn Vietnam’s increasing restrictions on free expression, state control of the judiciary and media, torture of political prisoners, and ongoing harassment of activists.
One case to draw the attention of human-rights advocates was the May 4, 2017, death in police custody of Nguyen Huu Tan, a Hao Hao Buddhist arrested just a day earlier on charges of disseminating anti-state literature.
Vietnamese officials reported Tan’s death a suicide, saying he lured investigators out of the interrogation room by requesting a cigarette, then dug around in the investigator’s briefcase for a letter opener, which he used to cut his own throat.
“Within three minutes, the investigator returned to the room, but Tan was in shock due to blood loss and he died shortly after,” Vinh Long provincial vice director Pham Van Nga told the official Thanh Nien news, as quoted by Radio Free Asia.
Nguyen Dinh Thang, the president of a Vietnamese-American community organization called Boat People, related Tan’s death Thursday to the House subcommittee in written testimony.
"If that story were to be believed, then the Vietnamese authorities must have displayed uncanny prescience: They had already ordered the coffin before Tan’s suicide," Thang's testimony says.
Though Tan’s family is pushing for an investigation, Thang said Vietnamese authorities have threatened to arrest Tan's surviving brothers unless they back down.
Authorities denied the family's request for an autopsy, Thang said, and demanded that they not invite neighbors or other family members to the funeral.
Tan’s sister, Phuong Nguyen, traveled to Capitol Hill today from her home in Savannah, Georgia.
She approached the subcommittee’s chair, Rep. Chris Smith, as the hearing let out, dropping to her knees in an emotional display.
Smith, who organized the hearing, kneeled down to comfort her. When he stood up, tears brimmed in the New Jersey Republican’s eyes.
"It is bad and getting worse by the day," Smith told reporters about the status of human rights abuses in Vietnam. "We're appealing to the president and the vice president, and Secretary Tillerson, to take seriously that they have a moral obligation to raise these cases.”
Smith called on President Trump to be "very, very assertive,” and raise individual cases of people persecuted by the Vietnamese government because of religious or political beliefs.