VIETNAM COUNTRY PROFILE
In 2025, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) again called for Vietnam to be designated as a Country of Particular Concern — although the State Department noted improvements in religious freedom since summer 2024, despite stressing more progress was needed. Vietnam remains highly uneven and inconsistent in its implementation of religious freedom. 228 Positive rhetoric and even solid gestures from authorities — such as allowing the Catholic Church’s first resident nuncio since 1975 in 2024 — vie with vague, draconian laws like Decree 95 which allow authorities to suspend religious groups for unspecified “serious violations” without giving reasons. State control intrudes into numerous areas, e.g., no form of religious education is allowed in schools, including Church-run private schools. Authorities have persisted in restricting the movement of religious ministers deemed a threat — including Redemptorist priest Đinh Hữu Thoại 229 — even preventing them from leaving the country. The government can effectively veto the appointment of religious leaders in registered churches. More than three-quarters of the country’s Christians are Catholics, with Protestants concentrated in the Central and Northern Highland areas. Ethnic Christian groups in the highlands, such as the Hmong and Montagnards, continued to be persecuted. Unregistered groups bear the brunt of state repression, with services disrupted or worse. While no suspicious deaths of Highland Christians were recorded in the period under review, these have occurred in the past. In August 2025, Đắk Lắk police disrupted several Montagnard- organized events for the International Day commemorating Victims of Violence based on Religion or Belief. 230
SELECTED INCIDENTS
JUNE 2025 Sisters mounted a new public protest over their ongoing demands for the return of their former school on Quang Trung Street, Hanoi. The property was expropriated by the Communist Party in the 1970s. 233 AUGUST 2025 A Catholic house Mass was stopped by police in Thái Nguyên Province at around 8.30 p.m. on Monday, August 11. The house in Bình Khang village, Đại Từ Commune had its electricity cut off before authorities entered and demanded the service end. 234 OCTOBER 2025 Pastor Y Nuen Ayun, a leader of the unregistered Montagnard Evangelical Church of Christ was arrested for “repeatedly providing fabricated information about religious activities in the Central Highlands, [and] slandering the government for arresting and oppressing people who participated in ‘Christian Protestantism’.” 235
DECEMBER 2024 62-year-old Pastor Y Hung Ayun was shot twice in his left knee at point-blank range. Another motorcycle pulled alongside his own as he traveled home to Tara Puôr village in Đắk Lắk Province, and a masked passenger shot him with rubber bullets before speeding away. Pastor Ayun who ministers in the unregistered Montagnard Highland Evangelical Church of Christ believed the shooting was designed to pressure him to return to the government-approved Evangelical Church of Vietnam. 231 MAY 2025 Montagnard Christian minister Y Thinh Niê was sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment for separatist activities. He was seized in late July 2024, without formal charge, after refusing to work under the auspices of the state-sanctioned Evangelical Church of Vietnam (South). 232
38 | Persecuted and Forgotten?
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