Human rights effort

Obama defends human rights effort in Vietnam

By Edward-Isaac Dovere

President Barack Obama defended his efforts on human rights in Vietnam, insisting on Thursday that what might have seemed like smaller moves on his trip there earlier this week will have larger impact in the long term.

Obama faced criticism from human rights groups for lifting the arms embargo that's been in place since the Vietnam War without more concrete changes or commitments from the communist government in Hanoi. That included blocking several dissidents from attending a meeting with the president on Tuesday in the Vietnamese capital, which Obama spoke about publicly at the time. But here on Thursday evening, the president said it had not been an embarrassment to him, as some have said.

"I wasn't the one who held them up," Obama said.

Obama said that meeting, his larger speech to the Vietnamese people shortly afterward in Hanoi and his town hall in Ho Chi Minh City were all examples of his sense of engagement, which mirrors what he's done in previous trips to Myanmar and Cuba.

"By us meeting with them, by us shining a spotlight on their stories, by us indicating not that we were going to dictate to them how these societies develop but we do think there are certain universal values that we care deeply about and that we're going to stand with, that that helps," Obama said.

Obama said he doesn't think shutting off ties to countries with human rights problems works.

"The expectation that, I think sometimes we've had, that if we just stand back and scold that somehow that's going to change these internal dynamics has proven to be less effective than us engaging," Obama said. "It ends up being a process and it's not always a process that travels in a straight line."