Vietnam abducts dissidents in Cambodia.
By Carl Robinson
Hanoi says they were caught “red‑handed” at the border. The sequence — disappearance, silence, then a ready‑made terrorism narrative — shows a security state extending its reach beyond Vietnam.
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Vietnam has just abducted two Viet Kieu activists in Cambodia and hauled them across the border, then claimed they were caught “red‑handed” entering Tây Ninh northwest of Saigon illegally. It’s the latest example of a security apparatus that now operates beyond Vietnam’s borders with the same confidence it shows at home — a police state extending its reach, and bending its laws to match.
Viet Tân is officially labelled a “terrorist organisation” by Hanoi, a designation the Ministry of Public Security uses as a legal Swiss‑army knife. The group itself is a diaspora‑based pro‑democracy network that advocates peaceful political change and has no record of violence. The terrorist label isn’t descriptive; it’s instrumental. It allows the state to criminalise contact, prosecute sympathisers, and frame overseas activism as national‑security sabotage.
Founded in 1982 in California, Viet Tân is one of the oldest overseas Vietnamese pro‑democracy movements. Its early “return” rhetoric faded decades ago; today it operates as a conventional diaspora political organisation with chapters in the US, Australia and Europe. Hanoi’s 2016 decision to brand it a terrorist group was never about behaviour. It was about utility. The designation gives the Ministry of Public Security a standing pretext to attach terrorism charges to anyone who meets, messages or merely associates with the group — including the two men now sitting in detention after their abduction in Cambodia.
The two men were Tran Hiep, a 51‑year‑old Vietnamese‑Australian from Melbourne, and Nguyen Duc Thuan, 52, a Vietnamese‑Norwegian from Oslo. They vanished in Phnom Penh on 18 September and were unaccounted for for ten days. Families and diaspora networks treated it as an enforced disappearance; Cambodia said nothing. Then Hanoi produced a fully‑formed story: the pair had supposedly slipped across the border at Mỹ Quý Tây and been caught “red‑handed” with forged documents and a Viet Tân sabotage plan. Viet Tân calls the charges “a blatant fabrication intended to conceal the fact that the Viet Tân members were abducted in Cambodia and forcibly taken to Vietnam.” But it’s the same choreography every time — a disappearance abroad, a silence, and then a legal narrative assembled after the fact to explain how the detainees came to be in Vietnamese custody.
Đoàn Bảo Châu was the prototype. A year ago the former journalist slipped out of Vietnam, resurfaced in Canada, and then laughed from exile as a Hanoi court sentenced him in absentia under Article 117 — the Count of Monte Cristo case I wrote about earlier. His trial was theatre performed for an empty chair, a conviction issued to a man the State no longer physically possessed.
None of this is new. Tô Lâm has been running extraterritorial operations for years, from the 2017 Berlin abduction of Trịnh Xuân Thanh when he was Minister of Public Security to the quiet disappearances of activists in Laos and Thailand. Hanoi now supplements these grabs with in‑absentia convictions, a bureaucratic trick that turns overseas dissidents into pre‑sentenced fugitives. Last December, a Hanoi court tried and sentenced two exiled activists in Germany — Nguyễn Văn Đài, the human‑rights lawyer, and Lê Trung Khoa, the Berlin‑based journalist who first broke the Thanh kidnapping story — handing each 17 years under Article 117. The Ministry of Public Security then demanded Germany arrest and deport them, a request Berlin ignored. These paper convictions sit on file like warrants, ready to be activated the moment the state gets its hands on the target. It’s a system designed to make every dissident already guilty before they’re even taken.
The external machinery mirrors what’s happening inside Vietnam. Hanoi no longer relies solely on arrests and prosecutions; it has built an administrative system that punishes speech without ever touching a courtroom. The latest new fines regime — up to 400 million đồng for posts deemed harmful to the “image of Vietnam” — gives the Ministry of Public Security a domestic tool as flexible as its extraterritorial one. Abroad, dissidents can be abducted or sentenced in absentia. At home, ordinary users can be fined into silence. It’s the same logic expressed through different instruments: a security state that has stopped pretending its borders or its laws constrain its reach.
The same coercive logic is visible inside Vietnam. Earlier this week, former political prisoner Huỳnh Trương Ca said police in Đồng Nai and Đồng Tháp tortured him in March to force an admission that he was a Viet Tân member — a charge he denied. When he fled while still on probation, officers turned to his family, hauling his wife and children into a station and forcing the children to write and sign a denunciation accusing their father of being “reactionary,” then pledge not to reveal what happened. It’s the same method expressed at home: if the state cannot extract the confession it wants, it manufactures one through pressure, proxies, and fear.
Both men now sit in Vietnamese custody, charged with terrorism and forgery, and cut off from the countries whose passports they carry. Australia has confirmed consular assistance for Tran Hiep; Norway is already in UN channels for Nguyen Duc Thuan, who is diabetic and requires daily insulin. Whether either government gets access will show how far Hanoi intends to push this. A police state that abducts dissidents abroad, convicts exiles in absentia and fines its own citizens for damaging the “image of Vietnam” is no longer improvising. It’s standardising its methods. The only variable is how much resistance it meets from the outside world.
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