Earlier this month in the Socialist Republic Vietnam, a carefully manicured election was run and won by communists. Last week in the U.S., the 32nd commemoration of Vietnam Human Rights Day was held.
Vietnam Human Rights Day allows us to adequately assess the facts about communist Vietnam. Despite Hanoi’s charm offensive as a stable, inexpensive spot for tourism and a low-cost vendor of cheap goods, the regime is brutally repressive at home and abroad.
Americans should deeply care about the attacks on Vietnamese-Americans and American citizens that occur right here in the United States, as well as transnational oppression against the Vietnamese diaspora from Thailand to Germany.
First, a history reminder. After a general international settlement for East Asian affairs in 1954 (the Koreas, North and South Vietnam, etc.), communist North Vietnam immediately began to undermine the Geneva Accords by intimidation, subversion, and violence, leading to American military involvement in Vietnam. After a peace deal in 1973 led to a U.S. pullout and security guarantees for South Vietnam, the North reneged once again and brutally overwhelmed the Republic of South Vietnam.
The reeducation camps and repression of religious people, journalists, scholars, business owners, and others have continued unabated ever since. As Amnesty International reports, “Government continued to rely on vague Penal Code provisions and tried to introduce additional new laws to counter dissent and suppress freedom of expression, resulting in further arbitrary arrests and detentions.”
So, despite the travel brochures, today’s Vietnam is not a democracy. Nor is it a free-market capitalist economy as the state owns much of the economic sector, there is zero private property, and the government can, and does, intervene in the economy every day. Vietnam is one of the world’s worst violators of religious freedom: it was once a U.S.-designated “country of particular concern” (CPC) alongside Afghanistan, China, Eritrea, and others. The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) continues to call on the U.S. Department of State to add communist Vietnam back to the CPC list because “authorities routinely detain, arrest, imprison, and torture religious freedom advocates and members of unrecognized religious groups that seek to operate independent of state control.”
Last week’s elections are a case in point of Vietnam’s totalitarian system: all candidates had to be vetted by the Vietnam Fatherland Front. No truly independent or opposition parties are allowed, and 93% of those elected were communists (7% were phonily classified as ‘independent’).
Taking a step back, what are elections supposed to do? In terms of process, democratic elections raise questions about participation, citizenship, competition, elite circulation, peaceful transitions of power, and minority rights.
In terms of context, elections demonstrate whether there is transparency and competition, freedom of the press, the right to assemble, and freedom of speech.
Elections are also about legitimacy. Political parties with high levels of earned legitimacy do not need to control election outcomes because they can win at the ballot box.
Vietnam’s elections fail on all three counts. Moreover, because the communists in Hanoi have long known of their own failures, they have stepped up their transnational repression against asylum seekers, human rights advocates, religious and press figures, and others in the Vietnamese diaspora. That is because when a political system is repressive and corrupt at home, voices abroad remain the only uncensored witnesses against corruption and repression.
The Vietnamese people have to rely on witnesses and advocates elsewhere, outside the barbed wire of communist Vietnam. That is why the government in Vietnam practices transnational repression abroad.
Transnational repression occurs when rogue governments, such as Hanoi, Tehran, Pyongyang, or Beijing, attacks their citizens (or former citizens) outside their borders using intimidation, coercion, blackmail, kidnapping, physical violence, or murder. A report from the Raoul Wallenberg Centre, Boat People SOS, and Montagnards Stand for Justice documents “the Communist Party of Vietnam’s (CPV) systematic and escalating use of transnational repression—including enforced disappearances—against Vietnamese refugees, asylum seekers, human rights defenders, religious minorities, and other Vietnamese individuals in exile.”
Cases include human rights leaders and minority rights advocates jailed in Thailand and then returned (in 2025), in contravention of international law, to Vietnam. Other examples include abductions by Vietnamese security personnel in foreign countries, the most egregious of which was the 2017 arrest and secret forced relocation of Trịnh Xuân Thanh, a regime whistleblower, from Germany, via Slovakia, back to Vietnam. These brazen abductions and physical attacks can happen in free societies because authorities are typically not expecting such brazen violence.
Here in the U.S., the diaspora community, led by groups such as the Viet American Association, Boat People SOS, Alliance for Vietnam’s Democracy, and others, routinely testify of harassment by agents of Hanoi on U.S. soil and via digital attacks.
The United States still has economic leverage over Vietnam: two-way goods trade totaled roughly $210 billion in 2025, and the US remains one of Vietnam’s most important export markets. Since other key allies are among Vietnam’s top-ten trading partners (UK, Netherlands, Japan, South Korea, Germany), the West retains tremendous leverage—if we have the will to use it. We could also limit external remittances. Finally, as Vietnam is routinely cited for online piracy, infringements of copyright, violations of intellectual property, and other illicit practices, the U.S. ought to punish Vietnam rather than make excuses for its illegal activities that harm U.S. businesses and taxpayers.