- Increased cooperation between Thai and Vietnamese authorities is putting Vietnamese refugees and asylum seekers in Thailand at heightened risk of forcible return to Vietnam. Vietnam and Thailand are cooperating more closely and exchanging information about Vietnamese exiles, particularly since early 2024 when the two countries began negotiating an extradition treaty.
- Thai police should stop arresting Vietnamese refugees and asylum seekers. Thai authorities should stop cooperating with Vietnamese police seeking their return.
- Outside governments need to expedite resettlement of refugees in Thailand and urge Thailand to prevent Vietnam’s interference in Thai refugee cases.
(Bangkok) – Increased cooperation between Thai and Vietnamese authorities is putting Vietnamese refugees and asylum seekers in Thailand at heightened risk of forcible return to Vietnam, Human Rights Watch said today. By facilitating Vietnamese cross-border abuses, known as transnational repression, Thai authorities are violating international refugee law protections.
Thai police have carried out several large-scale operations in 2025 detaining scores of Vietnamese nationals, many of whom are recognized by the United Nations as refugees and asylum seekers. Many of those arrested have reported encountering Vietnamese officials inside jails or immigration detention facilities and during check-in meetings with Thai immigration authorities.
“Vietnamese exiles are facing increased insecurity in Thailand,” said John Sifton, Asia advocacy director at Human Rights Watch. “Thai authorities should immediately stop detaining refugees and stop cooperating with Vietnamese police seeking their return.”
Human Rights Watch interviewed 34 Vietnamese refugees and asylum seekers in Bangkok from July through October 2025, including 7 people previously involved in human rights activism in Vietnam, 3 relatives of current political prisoners, as well as over 20 ethnic Montagnards and Hmong facing persecution in Vietnam for their religious beliefs or involvement in protests. Nearly all have been recognized as refugees by the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) or are registered with the UN as asylum seekers and are awaiting interviews to determine their status.
Most of the exiled Vietnamese interviewed said fears of arrest, abduction, or extradition to Vietnam have grown in the past two years due to increased visits by Vietnamese authorities to Thai immigration detention centers. They also cited the April 2023 abduction of dissident journalist Duong Van Thai, 42, a UNHCR-registered refugee who had fled Vietnam in 2019 and was awaiting resettlement to a third country. Unidentified men forcibly took him to Vietnam, and in late October 2024, after a closed one-day trial, a Vietnamese court sentenced him to 12 years in prison for publishing information “aimed at opposing the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.” Exiles’ apprehension increased further after Thai authorities, assisted by Vietnamese security personnel, arrested the dissident Y Quynh Bdap in June 2024. The Vietnamese government has labeled Bdap’s human rights group, Montagnards Stand for Justice, as a “terrorist” group.
In 2025, Thai police have carried out multiple operations targeting Vietnamese exiles, including in February, March, April, July, and October. Many of those arrested are ethnic Montagnards or Hmong from Vietnam’s Central Highlands, most of whom are recognized by UNHCR as refugees or asylum seekers with applications in process. Several Montagnards and Hmong detained in February through April gave consistent accounts after their release of Vietnamese police in Thai facilities pressing them to agree to return to Vietnam and later harassing them during check-in sessions with Thai immigration authorities.
Many refugees said Vietnamese police had visited their relatives in Vietnam in the last year, telling them that the police had located their relatives in Thailand and were arranging to have them returned.
Several human rights groups in Thailand have interviewed detainees and released exiles who corroborate these findings and have sent private reports to UN officials with allegations about cases of abuse.
Thai police regularly detain UNHCR-recognized refugees—including from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Myanmar—and hold them until they pay a bail bond, which most refugees and immigration advocates consider to be bribes. Human Rights Watch reported in July that Thai police routinely arrest and solicit bribes from Myanmar asylum seekers and migrants. Another Human Rights Watch report documented Thai authorities assisting foreign governments to target refugees.
The Thai government is obligated to respect the international law principle of nonrefoulement, or non-return, which prohibits countries from returning anyone to a place where they would face a real risk of persecution, torture or other serious ill-treatment, a threat to life, or other comparable serious human rights violations. Refoulement is prohibited by the UN Convention Against Torture, to which Thailand is a party, as well as customary international law. The prohibition on refoulement is incorporated in Thailand’s 2023 Act on Prevention and Suppression of Torture and Enforced Disappearances.
Vietnam and Thailand appear to have agreed to cooperate more closely and exchange information about Vietnamese refugees, especially those in detention, since early 2024 when the two countries began negotiating an extradition treaty. In May 2025, Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh and Thailand’s then-Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra signed a Comprehensive Agreement in which they “agreed to enhance legislative and judicial cooperation and committed to effectively implementing signed agreements between the two countries on preventing and combating crime, transferring sentenced persons, and cooperating in the enforcement of penal sentences.”
In July, several UN human rights experts sent letters to the governments of Vietnam and Thailand requesting information about many of these cases. The UN experts stated that “[t]here are concerns that the Government of Viet Nam may be exchanging information with the Government of Thailand to identify Vietnamese Montagnard refugees in Thailand for their possible forced repatriation to Viet Nam, including those recognized as refugees by the UNHCR and being considered for resettlement in third countries.”
The experts also expressed alarm about the reported incidents of “reprisals and intimidation” against exile human rights defenders in Thailand and “the undue restrictions” imposed on diaspora organizations, which they determined were “designed to further discourage cooperation with the United Nations” and prevent people from providing information to the UN.
Countries that have previously resettled Vietnamese refugees, such as Australia, Canada, Germany, and other European states, should consider increasing their resettlement of those at serious risk, Human Rights Watch said. The US has all but suspended refugee resettlement programs, including for refugees in Thailand.
“Thailand is now cooperating and is complicit in Vietnam’s transnational repression of exiles in Thailand,” Sifton said. “Outside governments need to expedite resettlement of refugees at risk in Thailand and urge the government to prevent Vietnam’s interference in refugee cases.”
Thailand-Vietnam Cooperation, Pressure on Refugees
Immigration Raids
Thai authorities for years have carried out sweeps to detain migrants and immigrants, many of them refugees or asylum seekers from Myanmar, Vietnam, and elsewhere in the region. Those arrested are typically charged for entering Thailand illegally or working without a valid visa. Asylum seekers and refugees registered with UNHCR are generally not authorized to work under Thai law.
Those arrested are usually held short term in Thai jails. Some obtain release after paying what authorities call fines, ranging from 1,000 to 5,000 Thai baht (US$30 to $150) each. Detainees unable to pay or otherwise obtain release from jail are then usually transferred to immigration detention centers, where they are held until they can post a bond, typically 50,000 baht (US$1,500), and demonstrate that they have obtained a Thai guarantor. In some other cases, they are deported or later resettled as refugees to third countries.
On February 23, 2025, in Nonthaburi province, just outside Bangkok, Thai police detained over 60 Montagnard people, including several UNHCR-recognized refugees, according to witnesses and UN reporting. Most were convicted of “illegal entry and stay” and sent to jail. Detainees subsequently were placed in immigration detention centers, women with children were transferred to an immigration detention center in Bang Khen in Bangkok, while others were sent to the Suan Phlu center. Police in May also detained several other Montagnard refugees and asylum seekers in and around Bangkok.
In other raids in March, April, and July, Thai police arrested dozens of Hmong refugees and asylum seekers. Some were able to pay fines or post bail to be released, but many Hmong people detained from early 2025 remained in detention as of early November.
In a more recent operation in Nonthaburi on October 29, Thai police detained 70 Montagnards in an early morning raid. According to local sources, those detained included 42 people whom UNHCR had determined were refugees or who were awaiting processing of their asylum claims. Several had been detained in the earlier raids.
The authorities soon released 20 of them, who had previously been released on bail, and took the rest to the Suan Phlu immigration detention facility. A member of the Montagnard community in Nonthaburi said that the next day, the Thai authorities fined the remaining detainees 5,000 Thai baht (US$150) each, indicating that they would be released on payment of the fine.
Threats to Families in Vietnam
Human Rights Watch interviewed over a dozen men and two women in Thailand from the Montagnard community in Bangkok who had fled Vietnam at various times from 2015 to 2023. Several said that government officials had regularly visited the exiles’ relatives in their home districts in Vietnam’s Central Highlands in recent months and urged them to tell their exiled family members to return. A Montagnard man in his 30s said police went to his village in February and told his parents that they knew where her son was and that they should tell him to come home, saying that if he returned, “there will be less trouble.”
Some refugees said that relatives arrested during the immigration raid in Nonthaburi province in April and May told them by telephone that Thai authorities had allowed two Vietnamese police officials to interrogate them in detention soon after their arrest. The police, their relatives said, threatened several of them with forced repatriation, demanding that they sign documents in which they would agree to be returned. Some said that while they were detained, Vietnamese police visited their families in Vietnam and attempted to coerce them to convince their relatives to return.
Several Hmong refugees reported similar incidents and trends. A Hmong woman, whose husband was a leader of an unregistered Christian church and who had fled with him and the rest of their family in 2022, said the police now regularly visit her parents and parents-in-law in Vietnam.
“They came on August 1 [2025] and told them, ‘We have an agreement with the Thai police to bring him back,’” referring to her husband, who had been in Thai immigration detention. They told them, “We’re going to put him in jail for his anti-state activities.” The woman said she believed the police were suggesting that if his parents and parents-in-law helped convince her husband to return voluntarily, he would be rewarded with some leniency.
Nguyen Viet Dung, a former political prisoner convicted in 2018 for conducting “propaganda against the state,” who fled Vietnam after his release in late 2024, said that his relatives in Vietnam had faced growing intimidation. He provided multiple examples of Vietnamese police visiting his parents and sister in 2025. He expressed concern that Vietnamese authorities would seek his arrest in Thailand because he was on still on parole from his 2018 conviction when he fled Vietnam, making his departure illegal.
An asylum seeker who fled in 2023, Hoang Hao, whose brother Hoang Duc Binh is a political prisoner in Vietnam, said the authorities have frequently harassed his sister in Vietnam. He said they press her to speak with him by telephone and urge him to return, while suggesting that they will otherwise compel Thailand to have him returned. Two other Vietnamese refugees gave similar accounts.
Vietnamese Authorities Harassing Refugees in Thailand
Several Hmong and Montagnard refugees who were held in Thai immigration detention in February through May, as well as refugees who spoke with detainees held there through August, said that Thai authorities allow Vietnamese police to visit detainees. With the involvement of Thai officials, they have repeatedly sought to convince or compel detainees to sign documents agreeing to return to Vietnam, which detainees have refused. And in March 2024, several Montagnards said Vietnamese police visited their community near Bangkok accompanied by Thai police, pressured them to return to Vietnam, and questioned them about other Montagnards who they said were wanted for arrest in Vietnam.
Several Montagnards described their interactions with Vietnamese police in detention or during check ins. “First they say they’ll be more lenient if you agree to return,” one said. “Of course we don’t believe them. They have been harassing our community for a long time.” Another said a Vietnamese police officer pulled him aside from the others when he had his monthly check-in with Thai immigration officials: “‘You’ve been here [in Thailand] for a long time, and still not been resettled to the United States. When are you ever going to get to go?’ They said, ‘If you stay here and the government here makes problems for you, then you can call us, and we’ll help you.’ The meaning to me was a threat. They’ll tell the Thai police to arrest us.”
In April, Vietnamese police pulled aside some Montagnard men during their check-in sessions with Thai immigration authorities. “They took some of us aside and yelled at us,” said a Montagnard Christian. He said that the police officer threatened them: “All Montagnards here are terrorists. We’ll tell them [Thai police] that you’re terrorists, and if you worship together [in church], the Thai police are to arrest you.”
After the arrests of scores of Montagnards in February, immigration lawyers successfully posted bail for most detainees, but Thai authorities rejected bail for two of them, Y Phuong Enuol and Y Duong Bkrong, reportedly because of warrants for their arrest in Vietnam, said advocates familiar with their case. UN rights experts noted in their July letter to the Thai government that Vietnamese officials in March visited these detainees, who, the experts said, “have expressed a fear of persecution by the Vietnamese authorities.”
Separately, Thai authorities in February through April arrested over a dozen Hmong men registered as refugees with UNHCR. Family members and rights advocates said most were affiliated with the Hmong Human Rights Coalition, a civil society group that monitors and reports on human rights violations against Hmong people in Vietnam. Vietnamese officials visited these detainees on multiple occasions in late April and early May at the Suan Phlu immigration detention center. They encouraged detainees to voluntarily return to Vietnam and to sign forms to facilitate their repatriation. None agreed. Most of the men remain in detention as of November 2025.
Thai authorities have detained Giang A Au, a Hmong Christian pastor who fled Vietnam with his family 10 years ago, with his wife and daughters several times, including as recently as April. His son, Giang A Nanh, 25, told Human Rights Watch in August that his father called him from immigration detention in early May and told him that he had been visited by a Vietnamese official, who identified himself as “Mr. Hung,” who had the father’s Vietnamese passport and national ID card, confiscated by Thai authorities during his arrest.
Giang A Nanh said that Hung told his father: “You and your family have been in Thailand for nearly 10 years. Vietnam has changed a lot. The United States has also closed its doors to refugees. There is no place left for you to go. Now you must return to Vietnam.” Giang A Au refused, and Hung said: “Remember, you have children waiting for you outside. You also have relatives in Vietnam, we know them all.” Hung then said that even if Giang A Au obtained bail, Thai police would rearrest him and that he would not be able to work in Thailand. If he tried to work, Hung said, Thai police would arrest him again.
Human Rights Watch learned in November that Thai authorities in late September had arrested the son, Giang A Nanh, and sent him to a Thai jail. After a month, the authorities transferred him to Thai immigration detention, where he has been held with his father and mother along with other Vietnamese detainees. His younger sisters, 18 and 21, are now the only adult caregivers of his younger brothers, ages 11 and 14.
The wives of five other detained Hmong activists said that their husbands had told them by telephone in April through July that Vietnamese security officials had visited them in detention and attempted to compel them to sign papers agreeing to be repatriated to Vietnam. The men refused, aware that the government considers them to be dissidents who have broken the law.
Vietnam state-run media have repeatedly broadcast reports that Hmong dissidents who left Vietnam without permission and criticized the government were criminals. A June 2024 broadcast on the government ANTV State Security Television featured a report on some of the 13 Hmong men arrested in March 2025, including Ma Seo Chang, Ma A Dinh, and Ma A Sinh.
The report said they had “illegally emigrated” to Thailand and claimed that the men were “defaming the policies of the [Communist] Party and Vietnamese State, fabricating false accusations about democracy, human rights, or religious freedom is the way these expatriates make a living.” Ma A Dinh and Ma A Sinh, who later obtained bail, said that the government considers them and other Hmong men arrested in March “enemies of the state.” ANTV again focused on the three men in April 2025, just after their arrest in Thailand, and in July 2025, and mocked their views.
Another Hmong activist, Lu A Da, a coordinator with the Hmong Human Rights Coalition in Thailand who fled Vietnam in 2020, said that he also encountered Vietnamese authorities twice after he was arrested and placed in Thai immigration detention in December 2023. His arrest had occurred just two weeks after he had spoken virtually on a UN human rights panel addressing discrimination against Indigenous groups in Vietnam.
Lu A Da said a Vietnam police official visited him in detention and that the official’s attempts to pressure him suggested to him that the Vietnamese government had sought his arrest. The official attempted to convince him to return to Vietnam, saying he would quickly process paperwork before the upcoming Lunar New Year. Lu A Da said, “When I refused his offer, he threatened me, warning, ‘You may do whatever you want in Thailand, but think about your family in Vietnam,’ This was intended to intimidate me into stopping my human rights work.”
Immigration Detention as Possible Vietnamese Proxy Detention
Several refugees and immigration and human rights advocates in Bangkok expressed concern that the Vietnamese authorities effectively made use of Thailand’s immigration detention system to incarcerate and punish prominent Montagnard and Hmong exiles, as well as to exert pressure on them and their communities to return to Vietnam.
Some former detainees said that during visits to Thai detention, Vietnamese officials said that they had requested that Thai immigration authorities continue their detention until they agreed to return to Vietnam.
In at least one case, the Thai authorities rebuffed a Vietnamese government request after the UN intervened. Lu A Da, of the Hmong Human Rights Coalition in Thailand, said that Vietnamese authorities, after pressing him to return when he was in Thai detention in late 2023, were subsequently unable to have his detention extended, after the UN officials secured his release. The Vietnamese government then ramped up their public campaign against him and other Hmong exiles, labeling them criminals.