A plan to legalise Vietnam’s private charities and clubs is shelved

EVERY Sunday deaf children meet to learn sign language in a borrowed classroom in Ho Chi Minh city, Vietnam’s southern metropolis. Pham Cao Phuong Thao began organising the lessons after her own son was born with hearing difficulties; her students include street children whom disability has made hungry. But after years of effort Ms Thao has still not obtained the permits that would make her charity legal. She says the paperwork produced to support her applications forms a stack a metre high.

Ms Thao’s small organisation is among more than 300,000 charities, clubs and associations operating in Vietnam, a single-party state with an increasingly vibrant civic life. Yet the country’s Byzantine bureaucracy—and the ruling Communist Party’s paranoia—leaves these outfits in a bind. For years campaigners had dared to hope that a proposed law, which was supposed to pass on November 18th, would help cement citizens’ right to associate. Instead lawmakers talked of tightening restrictions on civil society before shelving the bill altogether.