Scattered across Vietnam modern day slave labor work centers are in full swing with the governments OK as corporations pad their profits off the backs of some 40,000 men, women, and children. Held captive in forced labor centers which are thinly disguised as drug treatment centers, the majority of victims are brought in on the basis of a single positive urine test or are picked up in “street sweeps.” Once they become detainees, they are forced to stay for up to five years, without a hearing or trial in a court of law.
These victims of modern day slavery are held by the Vietnamese government and forced to work for little or no pay to produce export items such as; textiles, mosquito nets, cashews, and soccer balls. Labors are given daily work quotas which are most often impossible to meet. When one fails to meet their target they are most often beaten, forced to kneel on sharp stones, denied food, unable to access any personal hygiene, or held in an isolation cell.
On 7 September Human Rights Watch released a 121-page report, “The Rehab Archipelago: Forced Labor and Other Abuses in Drug Detention Centers in Southern Vietnam,” documenting the experiences of those confined to the 14 detention centers under the authority of the Ho Chi Minh City government.
“Tens of thousands of men, women and children are being held against their will in government-run forced labor centers in Vietnam,” said Joe Amon, health and human rights director at Human Rights Watch. “This is not drug treatment, the centers should be closed, and these people should be released.”
According to the report “the Vietnamese government reported that in 2007, 3.5 percent of detainees in Ho Chi Minh City centers were children.[227] Like adults, children can be detained for between one to two years.[228] Decree 135 of 2004 requires that detained children must take part in “therapeutic labor.”[229] There is nothing in the decree on “post rehabilitation management” to prevent a child from being categorized as at “a high risk of relapse” and subject to the additional two years of detention.[230]” The compilers of the report spoke to detainees at Youth Center No. 2 Some former detainees told Human Rights Watch that children detained at the facility were allowed to choose between work and educational study, but other former detainees said that work was compulsory. Luc Ngan was a child when detained at Youth Center No. 2, where he spent almost four years.
There were about eight or nine hundred of us there, all drug users, and the ages were from 12 years to 26 years…. School with the national curriculum was mandatory. There was vocational training in fixing motorbikes and computer work but it was voluntary and I didn’t participate. Work was compulsory. We produced bamboo furniture, bamboo products, and plastic drinking straws. We were paid by the hour for work: eight-hour days, six days a week.[234]
Action is needed now even more than before as the United States and Vietnam are in the midst of discussing a Trans-Pacific Partnership – a new free trade agreement that would give Vietnam benefits in its trade with the U.S. Tell the USTR that any trade deal with Vietnam should not move forward while Vietnam practices state-sponsored forced labor.
You can lend your voice to end these grave abuses against those held captive by signing the petition created by the International Labor Rights Forum to ask US Trade Representative Ron Kirk to call for an end to state-sponsored forced labor!
