Human Rights Watch on Friday accused Vietnam of kidnapping a blogger critical of the communist government who was living as a refugee in Thailand.
Thai Van Duong, who fled to Thailand in 2019 to escape Vietnamese authorities and was subsequently given refugee status, disappeared last week.
According to Vietnamese state media, the 41-year-old is now in custody in Vietnam after being detained for “illegally entering” the country through an unofficial border crossing close to Laos on April 14.
Phil Robertson, deputy director of HRW’s Asia division, demanded that Thai authorities investigate.
“State agents of Vietnam abducted UNHCR-recognised refugee Thai Van Duong off the street near his residence in Pathum Thani province just outside of Bangkok,” Robertson said at a talk in Bangkok.
Grace Bui, a friend of Duong’s and a former advocacy officer at The 88 Project, a non-profit organisation that promotes freedom of expression in Vietnam, said Duong “would never have (voluntarily) returned to Vietnam”.
Duong regularly posted YouTube livestreams that criticised Vietnam’s authoritarian government, accusing it of corruption.
State media said he ran a Facebook group which published “distorted information” about the private lives of Vietnamese leaders.
Bui described how on April 13 she received a call saying that Duong had disappeared. Witnesses later told her they had seen two white sedan cars block his motorcycle, one from the front and one behind.
““They came during Songkran so everybody was on vacation and all the stores were closed,” she said, adding that Duong had told her many times since 2021 that he felt in danger.
Bui told Radio Free Asia that she and her friends went to Thai’s home on Monday.
“Inside his room, everything looks normal, just like Duong has just gotten up in the morning and gone out for a quick walk,” she said. “We found the bag he often carried when going out. His wallet was still in the bag, and his UN card and bank cards were still in the wallet. We found his laptop also.”
The UN card is a refugee card issued by the UN High Commissioner of Refugees office in Bangkok to people who have refugee status and are waiting to be resettled in a third country.
Thai police said they had contacted Vietnamese authorities but had not received any information.
Vietnam’s ministry of foreign affairs did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The case comes after a German court in 2018 sentenced a Vietnamese man to nearly four years in jail for taking part in a brazen Cold War-style kidnapping ordered by Hanoi of an oil executive from a Berlin park.
The German government was outraged, expelling two Vietnamese diplomats in response.