ASEAN Beat | Politics | Southeast Asia

Arrests Spike as Vietnam Sees New ‘Wave of Repression,’ Rights Group Says

The Bangkok-based advocacy group Project88 documented 56 political arrests last year, the most in any year since 2018.

Vietnam has intensified its crackdown on activists, dissidents, and other critics of Communist Party rule, with arrests reaching a seven-year high in 2025, a human rights group said in a new report published yesterday.

In the report, Project88, a Bangkok-based human rights organization focused on Vietnam, documented 56 such arrests in 2025, “the most in any year since 2018, and double the number recorded in 2022.” Fifteen of these have already been sentenced, while the remaining 41 are “awaiting trial or [being] held without one.”

The report put this spike in arrests down to the rise to prominence of To Lam, the country’s former minister of public security, who has served as general secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) since 2024, and was then elected president earlier this year.

Under Lam, Project88 argued, Vietnam has become a “police state” in which the government “routinely weaponizes criminal law to arrest and imprison its citizens for exercising their human rights.”

Among those arrested were the dissident writer Huynh Ngoc Tuan, who was arrested in October and charged under Article 117; Y Quynh Bdap, an activist for the Montagnard minority group who was arrested in Thailand and extradited to Vietnam in December; and Pham Viet Cong, a land rights campaigner who helped residents in Ha Tinh province file petitions demanding fair compensation for land expropriated for the North–South Expressway project, who was arrested in July.

In June 2025, the authorities also arrested three men behind the YouTube channel Nguoi Da Tin (The Messenger) who have also been charged with publishing videos that “distorted content targeting individuals and organizations within the political system.”

The purpose of this new wave of repression, Project 88 argues, is to forestall the threats of “peaceful evolution” and “color revolution.” The Ministry of Public Security has previously described these as “the basic, long-term strategies of hostile forces, led by the U.S. and the West, to overthrow Vietnam’s socialist regime and eliminate the leadership role of the Communist Party of........

© The Diplomat