It's A Petition + Vietnam

Wednesday, February 22, 2012

60,000 + Vietnamese Americans have already signed up, so it might be good to know about.

Within two weeks, over sixty thousand Vietnamese-Americans with the support of human rights advocates from across the country have voiced their concern to President Obama, calling on the Administration to not expand trade with communist Vietnam at the expense of human rights.

The US Trade Representative, which reports directly to the President, is considering Vietnam's efforts to expand trade with the US through the Trans-Pacific Partnership and gain preferential tariffs on goods exported to the US through the Generalized System of Preferences. The petition asks President Obama to not decouple trade from human rights and seek the immediate and unconditional release of all detained and imprisoned champions of human rights as part of the trade negotiation with communist Vietnam. A list of 600 such prisoners is being compiled for presentation to the White House.

"With this petition drive, we would like to demonstrate our community's ability for self-mobilization around a common cause," said Truc Ho, President of SBTN who officially launched the petition drive on Feb 8, 2012.

The online petition drive makes use of the White House's "We The People" website. The petition must collect 25,000 endorsements within 30 days for the Administration to issue an official response. By the fourth day, the petition had already surpassed that threshold.
Read it in full here.