CORRESPONDENCE - 85A COMBINED REPORTS OF HUMAN RIGHTS IN VIETNAM 2012

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LAN QUOC NGUYEN, TRUSTEE BOARD OF EDUCATION, GARDEN GROVE UNIFIED SCHOOL DISTRICT November 18, 12 Ambassador Nguyen Ba Hung Consul General of Vietnam in San Francisco 1700 California St., Suite 430 San Francisco, CA 94109 Re: Santa Ana City's Ordinance Against Vietnam's Official Visits Dear Ambassador Hung: As a Trustee on the Board of Education of the Garden Grove Unified School District which serves substantial part of the City of Santa Ana and its residents, I would like to respond to your letter dated November 8, 2012 and addressed to the City of Santa Ana and its Mayor regarding the proposed ordinance prohibiting official visits by Vietnamese Government officials. Your letter contains numerous misrepresentation of the law as well as the standing of the Vietnamese government in relation to its own people in Vietnam or abroad. The proposed measure is simply an expression of the wishes of the people in the City of Santa Ana that they don't want to allow Vietnamese government officials to travel through the city with police protection while the Vietnamese government does not accord its own people the basic rights for free expression, religious freedom or rights to be free from arbitrary detention. These wishes from the City of Santa Ana residents are in sync with American people's wishes as expressed time after time through the Vietnam Human Rights Acts, which have been passed overwhelmingly by the U.S. House of Representatives over the years. You mention that the proposed ordinance runs against the U.N. 1961 and 1963 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. However, that convention is subordinate to the International Covenant on the Civil and Political Rights in1976 and the U.S. Constitution where implementing the diplomatic relations convention would interfere with the people's rights to free expression. The Vietnamese diplomats' wishes for safe passage through the city must yield to the residents' rights to express their protest to such visits. It's a customary practice in the U.S. that government officials, especially elected officials, do not cooperate with or assist foreign tyrants to subvert the will of the people they serve. Your representation that the proposed ordinance is inconsistent with the interest and aspirations of the majority of American and Vietnamese people is completely inaccurate. The American and Vietnamese people very much want to put aside the tragedy of the Vietnam War, but the Vietnamese government has persistently and systematically continued the hateful retaliation policies against the Vietnamese people who have any slight connection to the South Vietnamese Government such as abolishing religious establishments with connection to the SVG during the war, suppressing free speech, free press or free Internet for fear of the rising of any element connected to the SVG; or condemning people with connection to the SVG to life threatening measures such as re- education camps, new economic zones, elimination from official