BANGKOK – A new analysis from a prominent international human rights organization has uncovered a sharp, multi-year rise in politically motivated arrests in Vietnam, where authorities are leveraging broadly worded national legislation to target activists, dissidents, and ordinary critics seen as challenging the ruling Communist Party’s authority.
Released Monday by The 88 Project, a group that monitors human rights conditions across Vietnam, the report documents 56 confirmed name-verifiable, trackable arrests for political reasons in 2025. This figure marks the third consecutive annual increase, and is exactly double the total number of confirmed political arrests recorded by the group in 2022. Ben Swanton, co-director of The 88 Project, emphasized that the actual number of politically motivated detentions is almost certainly far higher, as the report only includes cases where defendants can be publicly identified and legal proceedings can be tracked independently.
The report centers its criticism on the administration of Vietnam’s new top leader To Lam, a former national security chief who assumed the role of General Secretary of the Communist Party in 2024 and was elected to the country’s presidency earlier this year. Under To Lam’s leadership, the report concludes, Vietnamese authorities systematically “weaponize criminal law” to eliminate all forms of public dissent.
The core driver behind this expanding crackdown, the report notes, is the ruling party’s deep-seated fear of mass pro-democracy uprisings labeled “color revolutions” — such as the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine and the 1986 People Power Revolution in the Philippines, often referred to as the Yellow Revolution. This anxiety is shared by the Communist Party of China, which has faced widespread international criticism for deploying identical legal tactics to suppress political opposition and critical speech. Despite periodic bilateral tensions over competing maritime claims in the South China Sea, the two communist governments reached an agreement earlier this year to jointly “prioritize political security and enhance efforts to prevent and resist color revolutions,” according to state-run Chinese news outlet Xinhua News Agency.
Swanton argued that To Lam’s rise to power has transformed Vietnam into an outright police state that refuses to tolerate any form of public disagreement. “This represents a serious regression from the period of relative openness in the 2010s when some dissent was tolerated and civil society groups were able to engage in policy activism,” Swanton added.
Vietnam’s Foreign Ministry has not issued any response to multiple requests for comment on the report’s findings.
The 88 Project’s analysis highlights that Vietnamese authorities increasingly rely on Article 331 of the country’s penal code, a vaguely worded provision that criminalizes “abusing democratic freedoms to infringe upon the interests of the state” and carries a maximum penalty of seven years’ imprisonment. Once a rarely enforced statute, Article 331 has been expanded in both scope and application in recent years, extending far beyond high-profile democracy and human rights activists to target any person who voices criticism of national or local party and government officials, according to a 2024 report from New York-based Human Rights Watch.
“The Vietnamese authorities’ increased use of Article 331 is a little known facet of the government’s expanding crackdown on ordinary people who are seeking to use social media and other peaceful means to publicly raise important social issues, including religious freedom, land rights, rights of Indigenous people, and government and Communist Party corruption,” Human Rights Watch found last year.
Among the 2025 arrests prosecuted under Article 331 documented by The 88 Project are three administrators of the popular YouTube channel “Nguoi Da Tin — The Messenger,” who were detained on allegations that their uploaded content constituted “distorted content” in violation of the penal code.
The report includes detailed case notes for every confirmed politically motivated arrest in 2025. Other notable cases include a Montagnard ethnic minority activist who was arrested in Thailand and extradited back to Vietnam to face charges, a dissident writer accused of spreading “propaganda against the state,” and a local man who assisted residents of Ha Tinh province in filing formal complaints demanding fair compensation for land seized for the construction of a new highway.
“The Vietnamese government has dealt alarmingly severe punishments to longstanding targets like journalists and human rights activists, while displaying an increasing willingness to attack groups previously thought safe, such as political exiles and legal petitioners,” the report concluded.