2/18/2025 Vietnam (International Christian Concern) — In an announcement last week, Vietnam’s Ministry of Public Security blasted Boat People SOS for participating in the International Religious Freedom Summit, an annual event cosponsored by Boat People SOS, International Christian Concern (ICC), and various other organizations from around the world.
The announcement called Boat People SOS a “terrorist organization” and publicized what it claimed was the residential and business address of persons associated with the organization to intimidate an organization that has long advocated for religious freedom in Vietnam.
In a separate announcement on its website, the Ministry of Public Security claimed that the IRF Summit “deliberately distorted and misrepresented” the truth to undermine Vietnam and suggested that the summit presents a security threat.
Summit partners, including ICC and Boat People SOS, have worked for years to raise awareness of the severe violations of religious freedom taking place in Vietnam and to respond to incidents of persecution — of which there are, unfortunately, many.
The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) has recommended that Vietnam be added to the United States’ Countries of Particular Concern (CPC) list annually since 2003. The CPC designation, by statute, is reserved for countries engaged in “systematic, ongoing, egregious violations of religious freedom.”
Vietnamese authorities, USCIRF wrote in its 2024 annual report, continue to “persecute ethnoreligious minority groups, such as Montagnard and Hmong Protestants, Khmer Krom Buddhists, and Hmong adherents of Duong Van Minh.” Officials try to force independent religious groups to join state-controlled alternatives and “actively restrict independent Montagnard Protestants’ religious activities, forcing them to renounce their faith and arresting and sentencing them on charges of ‘undermining national unity’ and ‘abusing democratic freedoms.’”
The U.S. Department of State, which manages CPC and Special Watchlist (SWL) designations, has designated Vietnam as a SWL country since 2022, indicating that Vietnam “engages in or tolerates severe violations of religious freedom.”
“The law provides for significant government control over religious practices,” the Department of State wrote in a 2024 report, “and includes vague provisions that permit restrictions on religious freedom in the stated interest of national security.”
Since the early days of the modern Vietnamese state in the 1950s and continuing since the fall of South Vietnam in the 1970s, authorities have tightly regulated religion in the Southeast Asian country.
As is commonly the case in socialist states — including China and North Korea — Vietnam allows some semblance of religion in the form of tightly controlled registered religious groups. Though the level of control exerted over these groups may not be as extreme as that found in North Korea or China, Vietnam requires that groups seeking official approval comply with an invasive, multi-year registration process and avoid any activities deemed contrary to national security and unity. This vague requirement gives authorities a great deal of latitude to restrict legitimate religious activity.
While registered groups face myriad restrictions on their activities, unregistered groups experience an even more sinister type of repression backed by a legal framework that criminalizes their very existence. Leaders and members of these groups, including many protestant Christians, are subject to spurious legal charges, arrests, and even physical assaults.
In some cases, authorities withhold critical identity paperwork such as birth certificates from members of these unregistered groups, effectively rendering them stateless, according to a 2023 USCIRF report.
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