Vietnam is increasingly using broadly written laws to arrest activists, dissidents and others that authorities consider a threat to the Communist Party’s rule, according to a new analysis released Monday by a human rights group. The 88 Project documented 56 such arrests in 2025, and the group said the real number is likely much higher because it only counted cases where the defendant could be identified by name and tracked. That’s the machinery at work: narrow records, broad repression, and a state that treats public grievance like a crime.
Who Gets Hit First
Among those arrested under Article 331 last year were three men behind the YouTube channel “Nguoi Da Tin’ — The Messenger — on allegations that videos they uploaded were “distorted content” that violated the statute, The 88 Project reported. The report also identified an activist for the minority Montagnard group who was arrested in Thailand and extradited to Vietnam, a dissident writer accused of spreading “propaganda against the state,” and a man who helped residents of Ha Tinh province file complaints demanding fair compensation for land expropriated for a new highway. Those are the people the system reaches for first: people speaking, petitioning, organizing, and trying to force a hearing where power prefers silence.
The report says the country under leader To Lam “routinely weaponizes criminal law” to quash dissent. To Lam, the country’s former top security official, has served as general secretary of the Communist Party since 2024 and was also elected president earlier this year. The report says the arrests are largely driven by fears of an uprising against the leadership in a so-called “color revolution,” like the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine, or the 1986 Yellow Revolution in the Philippines. Fear of people moving outside the script. Fear of unrest that can’t be managed from the top.
The Apparatus Calls It Order
“With the ascendancy of To Lam, the country has become a literal police state that tolerates no dissent,” Ben Swanton, co-director of The 88 Project, said. “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 said the actual number of arrests is believed to be much higher than the 56 documented in the report. Vietnam’s Foreign Ministry did not respond to requests for comment on the findings.
The report found that authorities are relying increasingly on Article 331 of Vietnam’s penal code, which makes it a crime punishable by up to seven years in prison to “abuse democratic freedoms to infringe upon the interests of the state.” Previously little used, the law has been stretched until it reaches far beyond the people usually labeled dissidents. New York-based Human Rights Watch wrote last year that authorities have enlarged the scope and application of Article 331 so that it reaches “further into society, beyond human rights and democracy dissidents ... to all those who voice any grievance with state or local Communist Party and government officials.”
That includes people using social media and other peaceful means to raise issues the authorities would rather bury. Human Rights Watch said the crackdown has targeted “religious freedom, land rights, rights of Indigenous people, and government and Communist Party corruption.” The pattern is plain enough. The state doesn’t just police opposition; it polices complaint itself.
What Power Fears
The report also places Vietnam’s crackdown in a wider regional frame. It says the fear of “color revolutions” is shared by the Communist Party in neighboring China, which has been accused of using similar tactics to stifle critics. Though competing maritime claims have led to confrontations between the two countries and a tense diplomatic relationship at times, China and Vietnam were able to agree earlier this year to together “prioritize political security and enhance efforts to prevent and resist color revolutions,” the Chinese state-run Xinhua News Agency reported.
The 88 Project said it documented 56 arrests in 2025, the third consecutive year of increases and double the number in 2022. It said the government has dealt “alarmingly severe punishments” to longstanding targets like journalists and human rights activists, while showing an increasing willingness to attack groups previously thought safe, such as political exiles and legal petitioners. That widening net matters. Once the apparatus learns it can punish one kind of dissent, it starts testing every other boundary too.
The report’s details show a system that doesn’t merely answer criticism. It hunts for it, names it, and locks it away under laws written broad enough to swallow nearly anyone who speaks up. The people at the bottom keep paying. The people at the top keep calling it security.