Before dawn on 11 June 2023, armed groups attacked two commune headquarters in Cư Kuin district, Dak Lak. Nine people were killed. Vietnam charged the attack as terrorism, tried a hundred people in a single sitting of a mobile court, and used the case to designate a peaceful Montagnard advocacy group as a terrorist organisation. Twelve United Nations special procedures then told Vietnam that the trial was not a trial.
Where DCHO stands
We do not defend the attack. People were killed in their workplaces at half past midnight, including police officers, commune officials and civilians, and nothing in our history makes that acceptable. We publish this article because what the Vietnamese state did afterwards — to hundreds of people who were nowhere near Cư Kuin — is the thing the outside world has not looked at, and because the machinery used has since been turned on Dega who have never held a weapon.
What happened on 11 June 2023
Within twelve days, seventy-five of eighty-four identified as involved had been arrested. Prosecutors brought charges of terrorism against the people's authorities against seventy-five; failure to report criminal activity against seven; concealing criminals against one; and organising illegal emigration against one.
The mass trial
On 20 January 2024 a hundred people were convicted, in one proceeding, before a mobile court — a court convened outside a courthouse, in this instance as a public event. The twelve UN special procedures who examined the case found that this court "lacked a clear legal basis and was not independent of political influence", and that it functioned as "a prejudicial tool to collectively shame the defendants".
Their other findings are as serious. The prosecutions, they said, involved arbitrary arrests and detention, and the defendants were charged with "vague and over-broad terrorism offences". The proceedings failed to guarantee the individual rights to prepare a defence and to choose and have access to legal representation. A hundred people cannot be individually defended in one sitting, and the experts said so.
The experts also recorded that Mr Y Bŭm Byă died in custody on 8 March 2024, after being tortured.
The designation
Vietnam used the case to designate Montagnards Stand for Justice — an advocacy group that documents abuses in the highlands — as a terrorist organisation. Its co-founder, Y Quynh Bđăp, was sentenced to ten years in absentia. The UN experts warned that the designation "may violate freedoms of expression, assembly, association and religion".
This is the part that reaches beyond one night in Cư Kuin. Once an organisation that writes reports is legally a terrorist organisation, everyone who ever spoke to it, sent it a photograph or was named in one of its submissions becomes a person with a terrorist connection. That is not a side-effect of the designation; it is what a designation is for.
The reach across borders
The experts called on Vietnam to stop targeting Montagnard refugees in other countries, "including by seeking the forcible return and extradition from Thailand", and warned against returning anyone where there is a real risk of torture. Dega who fled the highlands and are registered as asylum seekers in Bangkok are now the subject of extradition requests from the state they fled.
The principle at stake is non-refoulement: a state may not return a person to a country where they face a real risk of torture. It binds Thailand, and it is not waived by a terrorism designation issued by the country doing the asking.
Two accounts of the same word
Vietnam's account is that a separatist plot to establish a "Dega State" in the Central Highlands, directed from abroad, armed and sent men to kill officials. Our account is that seventy years of dispossession, six of them documented by UN bodies, produced a night that nobody should be surprised by and that we do not excuse — and that the response to it has been collective.
What the two accounts share is the word terrorism, and the argument is about its edges. The UN experts' intervention was precisely about the edges: that a law written for terrorism is being used on people who did not commit one, and on an organisation whose activity is publishing.
Sources
- OHCHR, Experts condemn misuse of counter-terrorism law against Montagnards in Viet Nam, 28 August 2024 — statement by twelve UN special procedures
- Radio Free Asia, coverage of the January 2024 trial
- JURIST, on the sentences
A note on the figures
Published sources differ on how many were convicted: the UN experts refer to a hundred people convicted on 20 January 2024, while some accounts give a lower figure for those sentenced in that specific proceeding. We have followed the UN statement and flagged the difference rather than quietly picking the larger number.
Compiled September 2026 from United Nations and published human rights sources. This case is live: Y Quynh Bđăp's situation in Thailand and the position of those convicted in January 2024 may have changed since this was written.