Michael Danby (Melbourne Ports, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Australia has good relations with Vietnam, and we have a particularly fond affection for the Vietnamese-Australian community. Today the Human Rights Subcommittee of the foreign affairs committee heard from VOICE, a local and international organisation that supports human rights in Vietnam; things we take for granted here in Australia—freedom of religion, freedom of expression, and freedom of assembly—that are denied people in Vietnam, where there is harassment of human rights defenders such as the heroic Minh Anh, who is here from Vietnam visiting the parliament and is sitting in the public gallery today. The committee and the parliament must take up the issues of Tran Huynh Duy Thuc, the entrepreneur who has been arrested; Nguyen Ngoc Nhu Quynh, aka Me Nam, the blogger who was convicted; and Hoang Duc Binh, the environmental and labour rights activist. We should use the new strategic partnership and TPP negotiations with Vietnam to leverage our rules-based order, referred to in the joint statement, to promote the rule of law including the observance and implementation of international legal obligations in good faith.

Vietnam's new cybersecurity law has been found to have violated certain provisions of the comprehensive and progressive agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, that Minister Tran Tuan Anh signed with Steven Ciobo on 8 March 2018, and there have been demonstrations all over Vietnam about that in recent days. DFAT should support local human-rights defenders, like Minh Anh and many others, by meeting them regularly and working with other embassies in Hanoi to ensure that the authorities' travel ban against them is lifted, and arbitrary arrests and assaults against human-rights offenders are promptly reported. We should request an update on DFAT's specific support including financial support for registered and unregistered civil organisations, and how they contribute to the development of independent civil society in Vietnam. Australia should do as other countries do, and support NGOs that are not registered by the Vietnamese government—because registered organisations are used to perpetuate the current system, unlike unregistered civil society organisations.

Above all, we should support the passing of a global Magnitsky act in Australia to punish individuals and entities committing gross violations of human rights, and to use as a deterrent in the future. I warn the Vietnamese government that, if it continues to persecute people in Vietnam, this legislation, a global Magnitsky act, is more likely to be passed here in Australia because of its violations of human rights in Vietnam. A global Magnitsky act would see Vietnamese officials not so easily able to come to Australia—not to travel to Australia, not to invest their funds in Australia, and not to send their children to be educated in Australia.