Expanding religious controls
Vietnam, under one-party communist rule, is expanding control over all religious activities and severely restricts independent religious practice and represses individuals and religious groups it views as challenging its authority, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedoms (USCIRF) said in a report this year.
“The Vietnamese government uses a specialized religious police force and vague national security laws to suppress independent Buddhist, Protestant, Hoa Hao, and Cao Dai activities, and seeks to stop the growth of ethnic minority Protestantism and Catholicism via discrimination, violence and forced renunciations of their faith,” it said.