Vietnam 'regrets' EU resolution on rights

(HANOI) - Vietnam Saturday expressed "regret" over the European Parliament's adoption of a resolution on the deteriorating human rights situation in the communist country.

"It is regrettable that the European Parliament adopted a resolution that is based on incorrect information and accompanying biased comments," foreign ministry spokesman Le Dung was quoted as saying by the Vietnam news agency.

"The resolution fails to correctly grasp Vietnam's situation and is not in line with the fine development in cooperative relations between Vietnam and the European Union."

The European lawmakers expressed their "deep concern" over a "new wave of persecutions" of Vietnamese dissidents in a resolution adopted this week in Strasbourg.

In the text, they demanded the immediate and unconditional release of all people detained for the sole reason that they exercised peacefully and legitimately their rights to freedom of thought, expression, freedom of the press and of religion.

"Ensuring and upholding human rights constitute ... major goals" for Vietnam, said Dung, maintaining that the country had "worked hard to build an apparatus that ensures those rights are maintained, developed and improved upon."

Vietnam was not a country which suppressed people who had differing political opinions, he said, repeating that those who had been jailed had been convicted for breaking the law.

Arrests and convictions of dissidents, accused of slander and propaganda against the communist regime, multiplied in the first half of the year.

They aroused a lot of criticism from the United States, the European Union and from human rights organisations which accused Hanoi of cracking down after it joined the World Trade Organization.