Dega Central Highlands Organization Dega Central Highlands Organization
Knowledgebase

Reports and documents

Reading and research Reference 71 views 16 min read Back

The human rights record of our people since 1975 is written mainly in reports: by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, by the United Nations, by governments, and by our own organizations. This page lists the ones we rely on, in order, with what each contains and where to find it. Most are free to read, and many are in our own library.

Family photographs laid out on a table
Testimony is evidence. These reports are how it reached people who would not otherwise have heard it. Illustration.

For asylum claims

If you are preparing a claim, the documents most often cited by decision-makers are the Human Rights Watch reports of 2002, 2011 and 2015, the US State Department’s annual reports, the UK Home Office country note of December 2024, Australia’s country report of February 2025, and the UN findings in What the United Nations has said. The British and Australian governments read the same facts differently, and a claim is stronger for answering both. Cite the document itself, with its date and page, not this page. We are not lawyers; read Reporting safely before you send anything to anyone.

How to read these reports

Every report on this page was written from outside the highlands, because no independent investigator has been allowed to work freely inside them. Each one rests on some mixture of three things: the accounts of our people who reached a researcher, often after fleeing to Cambodia or Thailand; what the Vietnamese state itself published; and the reports of our own organizations abroad. The mixture matters, and the reports say what theirs is. Human Rights Watch’s report of 2011 says it rests largely on Vietnamese state media, supplemented by interviews with people who fled and by our organizations’ reports. Its report of 2002 rests on more than a hundred interviews with highlanders who could not be named. Our own documents rest on what families told people they trusted.

Numbers differ from report to report because each counts something different: people sentenced, people still held, people named in one database, people killed in one period. Where two figures conflict, our articles set them side by side and say who counted, when and how. None of these reports is the whole record, and together they are still far from it.

Human Rights Watch

No organization outside our own has written more about us. Its reports run from the first deportations from Cambodia in 2001 to the extradition of Y Quynh Buondap in 2025, and its researchers took the accounts of hundreds of our people who could not safely be named.

Amnesty International

Amnesty’s documents on us are fewer and shorter, but its lists of prisoners of conscience give the aliases our people are known by at home and the prisons where they are held, which no other source does as consistently.

Delegates seated in rows at a session of the UN Human Rights Council, seen from behind
A session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, 2010. The Council’s independent experts have written to Vietnam and Thailand about our people, and its review of Vietnam has heard recommendations about them. Photograph: United States Mission Geneva, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.

The United Nations

The UN’s committees and experts do not investigate on the ground in Vietnam; they review what the government reports, what organizations submit, and what families send. Their findings matter because governments must answer them. The documents most often cited are these; the full record is in What the United Nations has said.

Governments and intergovernmental bodies

We do not list documents published by the Vietnamese government or its press. The government documents below are those of the United States, Britain, Australia, Canada and the European Union. They were written for their own purposes, intelligence, foreign policy or asylum decisions, and they are read here with that in mind. The oldest are the most candid, because they were never meant to be read by the public.

The typed cover of a CIA study, The Highlanders of South Vietnam: A Review of Political Developments and Forces, June 1966, with declassification stamps
The cover of the CIA’s study of June 1966, declassified decades later. It traces the politics of the highlands from 1954 through the FULRO rising of December 1965. Central Intelligence Agency, June 1966; Internet Archive copy of the CIA reading room release; public domain.
The title page of a US Senate hearing, The Plight of the Montagnards, Committee on Foreign Relations
The printed record of the hearing on our people before the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on March 10, 1998. US Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, S. Hrg. 105-465 (1998); Government Publishing Office copy via the Internet Archive; public domain.

Our own documents, and our allies’

These are our own documents and our allies’, written to make a case, as every report on this page was, including the ones by governments. They hold names, places and dates nobody else recorded, gathered from families by people the families would talk to. Where their figures differ from a figure published elsewhere, our articles set the two side by side and say who counted, when and how.

  • July 1993 — Human Rights Violations: The People of the Dega Republic
    Our own submission to the UN Working Group on Indigenous Populations, for its session of July 19–30, 1993: our account, in our own name, of what had been done to us since 1975.
  • 2003 to 2016 — Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization, Degar-Montagnards member profile
    The Degar were members of UNPO in those years, represented by the Montagnard Foundation; the profile and its news archive hold many documents, including the Foundation’s report on Easter 2004.
  • May 2008 — Montagnard Foundation, Vietnam’s Blueprint for Ethnic Cleansing
    An advocacy report, circulated to the European Parliament’s human rights subcommittee in August 2008. It records more than 47 of our people killed by Vietnamese security forces and cites Human Rights Watch for more than 350 prisoners.
  • February 2012 — Racial Discrimination and Ethnic Cleansing Policies perpetrated against the Montagnard Indigenous Peoples in the Central Highlands by the Government of Vietnam
    Our own submission to the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination for its 80th session: prisoners, deaths in custody and education.
  • May 2025 — Christian Solidarity Worldwide, general briefing: Vietnam
    Recent sentences of Montagnard Protestants, including ten life sentences after the Dak Lak trial and Y Krec Bya’s thirteen years.
  • DEGAR Foundation — Website and statements archive
    News and statements.

Land, forests, rivers and mines

Much of what has been done to us has been done to our land, and the best evidence of it comes from environmental researchers, journalists and organizations that watch rivers and forests rather than prisons.

What is missing

We have not found a UN document symbol for our submission of 1993, or the text of the agreement that UNHCR signed with Vietnam and Cambodia in January 2005 about the people in the Cambodian camps. No independent report yet says where Y Quynh Buondap is held or whether he has been tried again since his extradition. If you hold any of these, or know of a report that belongs here, please tell us.

See also: Theses and academic studies, Books about the Dega, Sources and method.

Compiled September 2026. Links change; if one of these no longer works, the title and date will usually find it.

reportshuman rights watchamnesty internationalciastate departmentuscirfuk home officemontagnard foundationunpolanddamsasylum evidencedocuments
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