Human Rights Watch's Asia director, Sophie Richardson, said in testimony Tuesday before a US congressional commission on human rights that Dien Dan X-Cafe, a website that hosted political and social discussions, "is now based in Europe after its Saigon-based moderators endured police harassment."

The website had also been targeted by denial-of-service attacks, Richardson said.

At a press conference in Hanoi Thursday, government spokeswoman Nguyen Phuong Nga said X-Cafe had violated Vietnamese regulations on internet sites.

Dien Dan X-Cafe "was not registered in Vietnam by individuals or foreign organizations," Nga said. She rejected attempts to link the government to cyberattacks against the website.

"The fact that some websites are hijacked or inaccessible is a popular phenomenon in the world," Nga said.

In her testimony before the US Congress' Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, Richardson criticized Vietnam's convictions of at least 20 Vietnamese human rights activists in 2009.

Vietnamese law makes it a crime to "spread propaganda against the Socialist Republic of Vietnam." In recent months, some democracy activists have also been sentenced on charges of conspiring to overthrow the government.

Human Rights Watch's criticism echoed similar critiques by organizations such as Reporters Without Borders, Amnesty International and the European Parliament, which in November criticized Vietnam for violations of religious and political rights.

Nga said Human Rights Watch is known for releasing "distorted information" about Vietnam and stated that the country had "no cases of people arrested for expressing opinions."

Deutsche Presse Agentur - March 27, 2010