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 released yesterday.
In the report, Project88, a Bangkok-based human rights organization focused on Vietnam, documented 56 such arrests in 2025, “the highest number on record since 2018, and double the number recorded in 2022.” Fifteen of them have already been sentenced, while the remaining 41 “are awaiting trial or [being] held without one.
The report attributes the rise in arrests to the rise of To Lam, the country’s former public security minister, who has served as general secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) since 2024 and was elected president earlier this year.
Under Lam, Project88 argues, Vietnam has become a “police state” in which the government “systematically uses criminal law as a weapon to arrest and imprison its citizens for exercising their human rights.”
Those arrested included dissident writer Huynh Ngoc Tuan, arrested in October and charged under Article 117; Y Quynh Bdap, mountain minority activist arrested in Thailand and extradited to Vietnam in December; and Pham Viet Cong, a land rights activist who helped residents of Ha Tinh province file petitions demanding fair compensation for land expropriated under the North-South highway project, which was halted in July.
In June 2025, authorities also arrested three men behind the YouTube channel Nguoi Da Tin (The Messenger), who were also accused of posting videos “distorting content targeting individuals and organizations in the political system.”
The goal of this new wave of repression, according to Project 88, is to prevent the threats of “peaceful evolution” and a “color revolution.” The Ministry of Public Security has previously described them as “the fundamental long-term strategies of hostile forces, led by the United States and the West, to overthrow the socialist regime of Vietnam and eliminate the leadership role of the Communist Party of Vietnam.”
As Project88 previously documented, the CPV issued Politburo Directive 24 in mid-2023, which called on the Party to counter the influence of “hostile and reactionary forces” that were taking advantage of the country’s increasing integration with the outside world. These forces, the directive asserted, were taking advantage of this greater openness to “increase their activities of sabotage and internal political transformation… by forming alliances and networks of “civil society,” “independent unions,” thus creating the premises for the formation of national political opposition groups.
As Project88 noted in its latest report, the promulgation of Directive 24 “marked the intensification of a new wave of repression” and cooled the relatively tolerant climate of the 2010s.
“The Vietnamese government has imposed alarmingly harsh sanctions on longtime targets such as journalists and human rights activists, while displaying an increasing willingness to attack groups previously considered safe, such as political exiles and legal petitioners,” the report said.
Another significant trend reported by Project88 is a change in the accusations used in political cases. Of particular note is the growing reliance on Section 331, a previously “rarely used” provision that makes it a crime to “abuse democratic freedoms to undermine the interests of the state.”
Section 331, which carries a penalty of up to seven years in prison, was invoked in 64 percent of arrests recorded by Project 88 in 2025, compared to 51 percent of arrests in 2024. These included the arrests of Pham Viet Cong and the three men behind The Messenger YouTube channel.
The other pending item was Article 117, which prohibits the conduct of “propaganda against the state,” which was used in 14 other arrests last year, including in the case of dissident writer Huynh Ngoc Tuan.
As Project88 notes, Articles 117 and 331 are useful weapons against dissidents, as they “both punish speech, both are deliberately vague, both view the state as the protected party, and neither recognizes truth as a defense.”