What to write down and what to try, in the first hours and the weeks after. We are not lawyers and this is not legal advice; it is what families who have been through it have told us mattered.
Important
Everything on this page carries risk for you. Families of detained people are watched, and asking questions has itself led to arrests. Do only what you judge safe, and treat every item below as optional.
In the first hours
- Write down the exact time they were taken, and where from
- Write down who took them — uniforms or plain clothes, how many, what vehicle, any unit name or number used
- Write down what was said, in the language it was said in, including any reason given
- Write down what was taken from the house — phones, documents, Bibles, papers
- Note who else saw it, even if they will not speak now
- Do not sign anything you have not read and understood
In the days after
- Ask, in writing if you can, which facility they are held at and under what charge
- Keep every piece of paper you are given — summonses, receipts, notices — and photograph them
- Record every visit you request and whether it was granted or refused, with dates
- Record any demand for money, and by whom
- If you see them, note their physical condition in plain factual terms
- Tell one person outside the highlands that this has happened
Afterwards
- Keep the record going — dates of hearings, the sentence, the facility, transfers
- Note the sentence exactly as stated, and the article of the penal code if it is given
- If they are released, write down their account while it is fresh, and their physical condition
- If they die in custody, record everything you are told and everything you observe, and who told you
- Send the record to us, or to a human rights organisation, when it is safe to
The things families most often lose
The exact date. The unit that made the arrest. The wording of the charge. The name of the facility. Each of those is what turns a family's grief into a case a UN body can take up, and each is usually gone within a year because nobody wrote it down on the day.
Why it matters
Our prisoner records hold 337 people by name, with their village, the date of arrest and the sentence, because families did exactly this. Sixty-two of the Gia Lai entries say only that the whereabouts are unknown — that is what it looks like when the record stops.