Vietnam has confirmed the arrest of two activists, reported missing in neighboring Cambodia earlier this month, whom rights group claim were abducted by the Vietnamese authorities.
The Ministry of Public Security said yesterday that its Security Investigation Agency had detained three men after they “entered Vietnam illegally from Cambodia,” the state-run newspaper Tuoi Tre reported.
Nguyen Duc Thuan, 52, Ho Pham Hiep Huy (also known as Tran Hiep), 51, and Thai Cong Truong Son, 46, are under investigation for “Terrorism” under Article 299 of the Penal Code and “Forging seals and documents of agencies and organizations” under Article 341.
Under questioning, the three confessed to being members of Viet Tan, a U.S.-based pro-democracy group that the Ministry described as a “terrorist organization.” It said that they also admitted to “carrying fake documents to illegally enter Việt Nam to conduct terrorist and sabotage activities.”
The Ministry’s announcement came after Thuan and Hiep corresponded with two political activists who were reported missing in Phnom Penh by Viet Tan earlier this month. In an alert dated September 25, the organization, which says that it advocates a “peaceful, nonviolent struggle” for democracy in Vietnam, said that the two men had been missing in Cambodia since September 18.
Thuan, a Norwegian citizen, and Hiep, an Australian citizen, had arrived in Phnom Penh from Bangkok on September 15 and were due to leave Cambodia on September 19, but never boarded their flights, Viet Tan spokesperson Duy Hoang told Cambodia’s Kiripost news site. Hoang added that the pair came to Cambodia to meet with Vietnamese human rights defenders who lived in the country.
Viet Tan, which was formed by South Vietnamese exiles in 1982, is high on the hitlist of the communist authorities, who remain paranoid about any advocacy that is even tangentially linked to the cause of the defunct southern Republic of Vietnam.
After the arrest of the pair, Viet Tan accused the Vietnamese authorities of abducting Thuan and Hiep from Cambodia.
“Viet Tan strongly condemns the abduction of two of its members in Cambodia and the fabricated charges issued by the Vietnamese communist authorities to cover up an act of transnational repression,” it said in a statement yesterday. The Ministry of Public’s Security’s claim that the two men were arrested for entering Vietnam illegally was a “a blatant fabrication intended to conceal the fact that the Viet Tan members were abducted in Cambodia and forcibly taken to Vietnam,” it added.
According to rights groups, these sorts of renditions are part of a worrying trend under To Lam, a former minister of public security who has significantly tightened the bound of permissible dissent since his appointment as chief of the Communist Party of Vietnam in 2024. In a report released last week, Viet Tan documented 20 cases “in which Vietnamese authorities have pursued critics and human rights defenders beyond Vietnam’s borders” in recent years.
According to the report, the trend marks “a new phase” in Hanoi’s security strategy. It argued that “repression is no longer confined to Vietnamese territory, but increasingly targets political exiles, refugees, bloggers, human rights defenders, and members of the Vietnamese diaspora residing in democratic countries.
Indeed, the case of Thuan and Hiep bears a close resemblance to that of Duong Van Thai, a prominent Vietnamese blogger and YouTuber who fled to Thailand in 2018. In April 2023, Thai went missing unexpectedly after he left his rental home in Bangkok to pick up a friend at the airport. Several days later, Vietnamese police announced that he had been arrested for entering the country illegally from Laos in similar circumstances to this week’s case. Rights groups including Viet Tan say that Thai was abducted by or on behalf of the Vietnamese government.
The following year, Thai was sentenced to 12 years in prison on charges of publishing anti-state propaganda.
In their pursuit of dissidents abroad, the Vietnamese authorities have been aided by the willing cooperation of many of the region’s governments, who now appear to have established a quid pro quo agreement that they will not permit political exiles and dissidents to use their territory for political actions in any other country.
In a report published in 2024, the advocacy group Human Rights Watch described this arrangement as a virtual “swap mart” of refugees and dissidents. This has involved both the arrest and deportation of political activists by governments, and a growing tolerance of (if not an explicit agreement about) the forcible abduction of wanted individuals.
In a statement today, Phil Robertson, the director of the rights group Asia Human Rights & Labour Advocates, described the abduction of Thuan and Hiep as “an unacceptable outrage.”
Their arrest “demonstrates yet again that Hanoi is arguably the most vicious and pernicious practitioner of transnational repression today in Southeast Asia,” he added.