Prisoners of conscience: Dak Lak

Sixty-six Dega from Dak Lak province, recorded by name as imprisoned for their faith, their land or their people, arrested between 2001 and 2004. Almost every one of them carries a sentence and a prison in the record, and almost every prison is the same one: Ha Nam, in the north. It is a record, not an argument. Every line is a person somebody is waiting for.

Dak Lak is the province of Buon Ma Thuot and the center of the highlands, and its record reads differently from the others. Here a sentence is recorded for sixty-two of the sixty-six, most of them long, from six to fifteen years, and almost all served in the prison in Ha Nam province, some thousand kilometers north of the villages the people came from. The arrests cluster in 2001, the year of the first great protests, and in 2004, the year of the Easter demonstrations.

One caution belongs on this table. In 2004, inside the years these records cover, the southwestern districts of Dak Lak were cut away to form a new province, Dak Nong. A person recorded here as being from Dak Lak may, by a later map, be from Dak Nong, so the Dak Nong record should be read beside this one.

The record

What this record shows

The near-complete sentence column here is the exception among our five records, not the rule; in Kon Tum, for instance, not one sentence is recorded. The difference is a measure of what families in each province could find out, not of what was done to their relatives. What Dak Lak shows plainly is the distance: a person tried in the highlands and then sent to Ha Nam was, for most families, beyond the reach of a prison visit for the length of the sentence.

Set against the other counts

The independent record of this province is thin on names and clear on scale. Dak Lak absorbed more than 623,000 new settlers over three decades, the pressure that lies behind the land disputes in these entries. Human Rights Watch documented at least 355 Central Highlanders imprisoned across the region since 2001; the cross-checks that can be done name by name, such as the differing arrest dates and sentences recorded for Y Ngun Knul of Krong Ana, are set out on the prisoner records page.

Searching this list

Names here were written down by many hands, from several languages, over years, so a name you cannot find is usually present under another spelling. Search the distinctive part of a name rather than the whole of it: drop the Y or H that begins Rhade and Jarai names, try the clan name several ways (Rmah, R’mah, Romah; Rcom, Ro Cham; Rahlan, Ro Lan), and try the name a family used at home, the “father of” name that begins with Ama or Bă. The full method, and the reasons the spellings vary, are on the prisoner records page.

If you know one of these people

Tell us what the record does not say: a sentence, a transfer, a release, a death, or a correction to a name, a date or a village. If you are the family, we will not publish that you contacted us and we will not add anything that identifies you. If somebody has just been taken, the information that matters is easiest to lose in the first hours; go to If a family member is detained and read Reporting safely before you write anything down. To see how these Dak Lak names sit inside the whole record, and the other lists worth searching, read the prisoner records page.

Sources

• The organization’s own prisoner records, compiled from family and congregation reports; the counts here are our tally of this table
• Human Rights Watch, Vietnam: Torture, Arrests of Montagnard Christians (January 2005) — the creation of Dak Nong out of Dak Lak in 2004, and the settler figure; No Sanctuary (June 2006), in our library; Montagnard Christians in Vietnam (March 2011), in our library
• Amnesty International, Renewed concern for the Montagnard minority (April 2004) and Prisoners of Conscience in Viet Nam (2016)
• UN special procedures, AL VNM 6/2021 (November 22, 2021), on Y Ngun Knul and four other Montagnard prisoners

Compiled September 2026 from the organization’s own records of arrests in the Central Highlands, set against the independent counts named in the sources. The underlying records date from the 2000s; treat every sentence as historical unless you can confirm it, and tell us what you can.