A day after saying Vietnam had made enough progress on human rights to merit lifting a decades-old U.S. ban on arms sales, President Barack Obama pushed back against his host country over that record.
Obama met Tuesday with a small group of civil society leaders in Hanoi before delivering a speech aimed at the Vietnamese people. On Monday, his first of three days in the country, he held a series of one-on-one meetings with government leaders.
"There's still areas of significant concerns in terms of areas of free speech, freedom of assembly, accountability with respect to government," Obama said Tuesday at a hotel in Hanoi, noting that Vietnam barred some people invited to the meeting by the U.S.