Nine matters in the Coalition’s register concern Vietnamese nationals, more than for any other country. Vietnam joined the Convention against Torture in 2015 and then declined three of its four supervisory mechanisms, leaving only the obligation to file periodic reports. In July 2025 the Human Rights Committee found that torture is used to extract confessions in Vietnam, and that it falls in particular on human rights defenders, journalists, dissidents and members of ethnic and religious minorities.
Why this page exists
Vietnam is not a state that sends people to third countries, and it does not appear in the States Engaging in Refoulement project. It is here because it is the country most often at issue in the register, in matters where people who have lived in the United States for decades, some admitted as refugees, face return to it.
One order in the register records a memorandum of understanding between the United States and Vietnam governing who may be returned. That is an arrangement about Vietnam’s own nationals and is not the kind of third-country arrangement the record band at the head of this page asks about.
What Vietnam has accepted, and what it declined
Vietnam signed the Convention against Torture on 7 November 2013 and ratified it on 5 February 2015. It then declined, by formal declaration, the Committee’s competence to conduct an inquiry under article 20, and declined to be bound by article 30 on the settlement of disputes. It has made no declaration under article 21 or article 22.
Set out plainly: the Convention gives the Committee against Torture four ways of supervising a state. Vietnam has declined three of them. The only one that remains is the requirement to submit periodic reports on itself. It has been reviewed once, in 2018. Its second report was received in March 2024 and it has not been reviewed on it.
Vietnam acceded to the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights on 24 September 1982. It is not a party to the Optional Protocol to that Covenant, to the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture, or to the Convention on Enforced Disappearance.
No United Nations treaty body can receive an individual complaint about Vietnam, on any ground, torture included. There is no Asian regional human rights court. The only regional body is the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights, whose own founding instrument describes it as a consultative body; it has no power to receive individual complaints, investigate, or issue binding decisions.
The consequence is worth stating. Vietnam is under intensive United Nations scrutiny, with fourteen Working Group opinions since 2022 and a 2025 treaty-body finding of torture. None of it is adjudication, and none of it gives a Vietnamese torture victim a forum.
What United Nations bodies have found
The Human Rights Committee, 2025. This is the most current finding by a United Nations body on torture in Vietnam. In concluding observations adopted on 15 July 2025 the Committee recorded concern at reports of torture and ill-treatment used to extract confessions during investigations, and at those confessions later being presented as evidence in court, including in capital cases. It was “seriously concerned” that torture and ill-treatment are inflicted in particular on human rights defenders, journalists, dissidents and members of ethnic and religious minorities, and that some victims are denied medical treatment. It regretted the absence of information on any independent investigation into deaths in custody resulting from torture. It recorded credible reports of solitary confinement and of leg shackling for ten days used as a disciplinary measure.
The same observations record concern at prolonged pre-trial detention used particularly against dissidents, defenders, journalists and minorities, and at a provision of the Code of Criminal Procedure allowing those accused of national security offences to be detained indefinitely without judicial review, alongside a restriction on their access to counsel.
The Committee against Torture, 2018. In its only review of Vietnam the Committee expressed grave concern at reports of the widespread practice of torture and ill-treatment, in particular during pre-trial detention, sometimes resulting in death in custody. The Coalition quotes this as the United Nations human rights office restated it in a later official compilation; the paragraph text of the observations could not be retrieved.
The Working Group on Arbitrary Detention. Fourteen opinions concerning Vietnam between 2022 and 2026. Three contain findings on torture or ill-treatment. In opinion 49/2025 the Working Group expressed grave concern at an allegation of torture, including beatings, by police during incommunicado pre-trial detention to induce an admission of guilt, and referred the case to the Special Rapporteur on torture. In opinion 43/2022 it held that incommunicado detention is an environment conducive to torture and may itself amount to torture or ill-treatment, and again referred the case. In opinion 22/2023 it found that incommunicado detention designed to compel a confession constituted ill-treatment and might rise to the level of torture. In thirteen of the fourteen it found the detention discriminatory on grounds including political opinion, ethnicity or religion.
A death in custody, named by the United Nations. In a joint statement of 28 August 2024, twelve mandate holders recorded that detainees had been subjected to torture and to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment including forced confessions, and that one detainee, Y Būm Byă, died in custody on 8 March 2024 after being tortured.
Ethnic and religious minorities
Several protection claims involving Vietnamese nationals turn on minority status, and the United Nations record names the groups. The Human Rights Committee in 2025 recorded deep concern at increasing discrimination against, and harassment and intimidation of, religious minorities, naming Montagnard and Hmong Protestants, Khmer Krom Buddhists, and the Cao Dai and Hoa Hao. It recorded that national security and counter-terrorism laws are applied to target religious minorities, and that Montagnard former prisoners are subject to a mandatory programme of post-imprisonment education by local authorities.
The Committee’s findings interlock. Torture is found to fall in particular on members of ethnic and religious minorities, and prolonged pre-trial detention is found to be used particularly against them. The minority ground and the torture ground are joined in the Committee’s own text.
In December 2025 six mandate holders said that the extradition of a Montagnard activist from Thailand to Vietnam exposed him to a serious risk of torture, enforced disappearance and arbitrary detention, and that the transfer violated the obligation of non-refoulement.
A designation often reported wrongly. The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom recommended in March 2026 that Vietnam be designated a Country of Particular Concern. The Commission recommends; it does not designate. The State Department’s own designation, made on 29 December 2023 and unchanged since, places Vietnam on the Special Watch List, not among the Countries of Particular Concern.
What independent organisations have documented
Human Rights Watch records in its 2026 annual chapter that a political prisoner, Vuong Van Tha, died in September 2025 under unclear circumstances while serving a twelve-year sentence, and that followers of independent religious groups face pre-trial detention, interrogation, torture and imprisonment. Amnesty International records imprisoned defenders held in leg shackles for ten days and in weeks of solitary confinement. That last detail is independently matched by the Human Rights Committee’s own finding, which is unusual and worth noting: two sources, one of them a treaty body, on the same specific practice.
What runs the other way
Vietnam contests these accounts and has answered them. It filed replies to the special procedures communications. In its second report to the Committee against Torture it reports prosecutions of officials for corporal punishment: six criminal cases against fifteen accused between November 2018 and December 2022, of which five ended in the conviction of twelve people. The Human Rights Committee, in the same session that produced the findings above, also recorded positive developments in Vietnam’s human rights framework.
The report that carries those prosecution figures carries something else. It contains no statistics on deaths in custody, none on torture complaints, and no prosecution or conviction under the provision of the Criminal Code that penalises obtaining testimony by coercion.
What is not established
Any reliable figure for deaths in custody in Vietnam. A number attributed to the Ministry of Public Security circulates widely; the Coalition could not trace it to any official source and does not use it. Investigating.
The paragraph text of the 2018 concluding observations of the Committee against Torture, which the Coalition could not retrieve. What appears above is an official United Nations restatement of it.
The outcome of Vietnam’s second review by the Committee against Torture, which has not taken place.
The decisions on this site
Nguyen v. Scott, W.D. Wash., 25 July 2025, 30 July 2025 and 21 August 2025.
Hoac v. Becerra, E.D. Cal., 16 July 2025.
Tang v. Bondi, W.D. Wash., 11 September 2025. The petitioner is recorded as stateless, born in a refugee camp in the Philippines, with Vietnam designated in the removal order. The court found he was likely to show no significant likelihood of removal to Vietnam because he fails the eligibility conditions of the memorandum of understanding on its face.
Abubaka v. Bondi, W.D. Wash., 17 November 2025.
Bui v. Noem, C.D. Cal., 30 December 2025. Admitted to the United States as a refugee in 1992 and ordered removed to Vietnam in the late 1990s.
Nguyen v. Bondi, W.D. Wash., 3 February 2026.
Pham v. Warden, E.D. Cal., 26 March 2026. Granted on all three due process grounds.
Sources
Treaty status, from the depositary. Convention against Torture, for the ratification of 5 February 2015, the article 28 and article 30 declarations, and the absence of any article 21 or article 22 declaration. International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Terms of Reference of the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights, for the description of that body as consultative.
United Nations bodies. CCPR/C/VNM/CO/4, Human Rights Committee, adopted 15 July 2025. CAT/C/VNM/CO/1, 28 December 2018. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, opinion 49/2025. Opinion 43/2022. Experts on the Montagnards, 28 August 2024. Experts on the extradition of Y Quynh Bdăp, 3 December 2025.
Vietnam’s own account. CAT/C/VNM/2, second periodic report, received 25 March 2024.
United States designation. Countries of Particular Concern and Special Watch List, Department of State.
Independent organisations. Human Rights Watch, World Report 2026, Vietnam chapter, 16 January 2026. Amnesty International, Report 2025/26, Viet Nam.
Compiled 13 September 2026. United Nations documents spell the state Viet Nam; this page uses Vietnam except when citing a document by its title. Where this page summarises a decision or a report, the full document is linked above and should be read rather than relied on through the summary.