Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, Tom Malinowski
U.S. Mission Hanoi – Hanoi, Vietnam
2014-10-27
Moderator: — But we’re very fortunate in our visitor today because of the wide-ranging nature of the topics, which are of such interest these days, we’re pleased to have Tom Malinowski who is the Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, the Department of State. He’s been in that position since April of this year, 2014. Prior to that he spent more than a decade as the Director of the Washington, DC office of Human Rights Watch. Earlier in his career he also worked for the State Department in our Policy Planning Division. I think we’ll dive right in.
This event is on the record and he’s here to talk about his visit here to Vietnam.
Assistant Secretary Malinowski: Thank you everybody. Thanks for joining us.
We’re just finishing several days here in Hanoi. It’s my first trip since the year 2000 when I was here with President Clinton on his historic trip to the country that year.
I have had a very very productive set of meetings. We met with the Vice Minister of Public Security, To Lam; the Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs; the External Relations Committee of the Communist Party; National Assembly; a number of meetings with members of civil society. Today we attended services at the Hanoi Evangelical Church, stopped by Quan Su Pagoda, and this evening will be going to a Catholic mass in the city.
Yesterday we spent a day outside of town in Thai Nguyen visiting the Phu Son Prison which the Ministry of Public Security arranged for us.
We’ve had a lot of diplomatic activity in the last few weeks. I’m here in the wake of Ambassador Froman’s visit, our Trade Representative. The Foreign Minister of Vietnam was just in Washington, met with Secretary Kerry, where we announced the partial lifting of the lethal arms ban. And made clear that we want to do more to deepen the relationship, we can do more, both in the realm of security cooperation, TPP; but we can do this if, and only if, there’s demonstrable progress on human rights.
So the purpose of my trip is to explore what progress might be possible this year and over the next couple of years.
Read more: http://www.humanrights.gov/2014/10/30/media-roundtable-in-hanoi-with-assistant-secretary-malinowski/
