Chris Smith

Our policies cannot be directed at the Vietnamese elite in the Communist Party but must focus on the people of Vietnam.

It can't be a sidebar issue. It can't be something that's in the appendix that is brought up in a cursory way.

The U.S. Government must continue to press the Vietnamese Government on truly fundamental human rights issues.

The Vietnamese Government and Communist Party continue to be one of the worst abusers of human rights.

I thank our distinguished chairman and thank both he and Eliot Engel for the leadership that they have both shown. Mr. Chairman, I want to thank you for keeping that focus on all issues related to Iran and for doing it so effectively…

When a peacekeeper from a particular member state is found or is alleged to have committed crimes... they go back to their home State

I chaired a series of hearings beginning in 2005. I went to Goma. I spent a better part of a week meeting with peacekeepers...

Thank you, Madam Chair. And welcome, Madam Ambassador, and thank you for your testimony and for your work.

I thank my good friend, the chairman, for your commitment to the men and women who support our warfighters. I look forward to working with you to move the pay parity for all joint base employees forward.

We will be tenacious in making sure it is faithfully implemented.

I will never stop fighting for the ability to be involved in their lives.

But I think what you pointed out with even the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in Japan, we need to become a tailwind behind the reformers in Japan...

The unresolved abduction case definition in Public Law 113-150, the Goldman Act, is as clear-cut as I could possibly imagine it.

We look forward to doing that.

Hopefully there will be significant and robust sanctions against those 22 countries and I would hope that they will revisit Japan, as I mentioned to our two previous panelists, because Japan absolutely has to be on the list. It is a…

I mean, that is like a body blow to a long-suffering left-behind parent in this case.

But, again, as I said in my opening getting the Trafficking Victims Protection Act--a whole another issue but it is certainly a serious human rights abuse issue--we have always argued just get it right in the report and then part two, the…

I believe, based on the clear language of the Goldman Act, Japan should be the 23rd nation on the pattern of noncompliance.

Well, again, these are desperate loving parents who have been frustrated to nausea with the lack of responsiveness by us, the U.S. Government, and especially by the Japanese Government.

The Goldman Act is a law calculated to get results, as we did in return of Sean Goldman from Brazil in 2008.

A bilateral relationship, like any friendship, needs to be based on trust, it needs to be based on honesty, clarity and not putting uncomfortable truths under the table like this egregious wound that it does to your children as well as to…

The Senate finally had the bill on the floor, which I had introduced 5 years ago.

Child abduction is child abuse and it continues to plague families across the United States.

International parental child abduction rips children from their homes and families and whisks them away to a foreign land.

The worst violators of the rights of the Chinese people, those who abuse universal freedoms with impunity, should not prosper from access to the United States.