On the 13th anniversary of Sombath Somphone’s disappearance, I join others in calling on the international community to continue its appeals to the Government of Laos to resolve the case, reveal the truth of his disappearance, disclose his whereabouts and his fate, and return him safely to his family.
What is a bodhisattva? Or rather, “what does ‘bodhisattva’ mean to you?” This was the framing question for the 2025 International Network of Engaged Buddhists (INEB) Young Bodhisattva Program (YBP), hosted by Buddhist Hongshi College in Taoyuan, Taiwan.
Entering the program, I had a simple answer to this question that came from my rather shallow knowledge of Buddhist literature. A bodhisattva is a sentient being that has achieved spiritual enlightenment but chosen not to ascend to the higher realms of Nirvana and thus be freed from the suffering / discontent (Duḥkha) of the endless cycle of rebirth (Saṃsāra), until all sentient beings are enlightened. In short, a bodhisattva prioritises alleviating the suffering of others over the eradication of self-suffering. This may be inaccurate as I’m not a scholar of Buddhism but, regardless, this was my understanding. Continue reading “Reflections on Sombath Somphone and Engaged Buddhism on the 13th Anniversary of his Enforced Disappearance”
15 December 2025. On the 13-year anniversary of the enforced disappearance of Lao civil society leader Sombath Somphone, we, the undersigned civil society organizations and individuals worldwide, urge once again United Nations (UN) member states and Laos’ development and international cooperation partners to demand the Lao government promptly resolve Sombath’s enforced disappearance and deliver justice and an effective remedy and reparations to him and his family.
Despite calls by civil society organizations for states to use the fourth Universal Periodic Review (UPR) of Laos in April 2025 to express their concern over the Lao government’s protracted failure to determine Sombath’s fate or whereabouts, only one — Canada — recommended the Lao government conduct a credible investigation into Sombath’s enforced disappearance.
We deplore this silence over Sombath’s enforced disappearance, as it is likely to continue to facilitate the Lao authorities in their determination to shield the perpetrators of such a serious crime from accountability.
We note that various individuals who occupied high-ranking positions in the government when Sombath disappeared retain important official roles in the country’s political sphere today. These individuals could and should play a proactive role in clarifying Sombath’s fate and achieving truth and justice.
For example, Thongloun Sisoulith, who served as Foreign Minister and Deputy Prime Minister of Laos at the time of Sombath’s enforced disappearance, is now the country’s President and the General Secretary of the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party – effectively, the supreme leader of Laos. Chaleun Yiapaoher, then-Minister of Justice, is now one of the National Assembly’s Vice-Presidents. Thongsing Thammavong, then-Prime Minister, is currently a National Assembly member. These and other influential individuals hold the key to resolve Sombath’s enforced disappearance – a case that has been described by the International Commission of Jurists as “eminently solvable.”
UN member states and Laos’ development and international cooperation partners should press the government to establish the fate or whereabouts of Sombath and all other victims of enforced disappearances in the country, identify the suspected perpetrators of such serious crimes, and provide victims with an effective remedy and full reparations. To date, no case of enforced disappearance in Laos has been resolved and no perpetrators have been identified or brought to justice.
In its September 2025 report, the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances emphasized that the disappearance of community leaders such as Sombath resulted in a collective impact on the groups to which they belonged, including by weakening community ties, depriving them of leadership, and increasing their vulnerability to “cultural erosion and environmental exploitation.” The Working Group further stated that Sombath’s disappearance created a chilling effect on public participation, noting reports of “serious risks and fear” of retaliation when his name is mentioned.
We urge the Lao government to promptly ratify, without reservations, the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, which it signed in September 2008, and fully implement it into national law, policies, and practices.
We continue to stand in solidarity with Sombath and his family and urge UN member states to support our calls for truth, justice, and accountability for all cases of victims of enforced disappearance in Laos.
Even if 13 years have passed, the Lao government is obligated to answer the question we and many others have been asking since 15 December 2012: “Where is Sombath”?
Background
Sombath Somphone, a pioneer in community-based development and youth empowerment, was last seen at a police checkpoint on a busy street in Vientiane, the capital of Laos, on the evening of 15 December 2012. Footage from a traffic CCTV camera showed that police stopped Sombath’s vehicle at the checkpoint and that, within minutes, unknown individuals forced him into another vehicle and drove him away in the presence of police officers. CCTV footage also showed an unknown individual arriving and driving Sombath’s vehicle away from the city center. In December 2015, Sombath’s family obtained new CCTV footage from the same area and made it public. The video shows Sombath’s car being driven back towards the city by an unknown individual.
Letter to Sombath Somphone On the occasion of the 4th Cycle of the UPR on Laos in Geneva 28 September 2025
My dearest Sombath,
I am writing you today to tell you that during the 4th Cycle of the UPR on the Lao PDR which took place in Geneva from 25-26 September, your enforced disappearance on December 15, 2012 (twelve years ago) in front of the police post in Vientiane, is still an issue of concern to many countries, human rights organizations, and civil society groups.
Concerned member states, human rights organizations, and civil society groups continued to condemn the inaction of the Lao Government to investigate your disappearance. They continued to urge the Lao authorities to act with accountability and transparency to resolve your case and to reveal the facts about your abduction.
Rights Watch (HRW) in its statement at the UPR, for example, expressed concerns about the Lao PDR’s dismissal of several proposed measures to conduct credible investigations into your enforced disappearance, and that of other unresolved cases. HRW continued to urge the Lao government to conduct a full and impartial investigation of your enforced disappearance and to disclose your fate, pointing out that your disappearance is emblematic of Laos’ broader impunity for rights violations committed against its critics.
Similarly, the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), condemned the Lao authorities’ protracted inaction in the investigation into your disappearance and urged it to reveal your fate and whereabouts. It further stated that “the government’s refusal to accept a recommendation to investigate the enforced disappearance of civil society leader Sombath Somphone is particularly disturbing.”
These statements of concern and expression of condemnation by international agencies are heartening to read because they show that the injustice and violation of your rights and dignity have not been forgotten, even with the passing of time. Such continued actions also give me some comfort that all governments are still held accountable to a set of internationally agreed human rights standards and practices, and their compliance or lack thereof will still be publicly judged on international platforms.
To the many organizations, concerned governments, and the UN Treaty bodies, I can only express my sincere gratitude to you for your persistent efforts to seek justice and truth for the victims of human rights abuses and violations, and for their family members who are ordinary people like myself and many other voiceless individuals. We ordinary citizens generally have no or little power to seek redress against such violations, and are left mostly to suffer in silence and hopelessness.
On my part, my dearest Sombath, I will never forget or give up my struggle to find you, and to find justice and truth for you and for our family.
Sombath Somphone training students in Laos on human rights issues.
On the evening of 5 December 2012, Sombath Somphone was stopped at a police checkpoint in Laos. It was a busy street in the capital, Vientiane. Within minutes, unknown individuals forced Sombath into another vehicle and drove him away – all in the presence of police officers, all caught on CCTV. He hasn’t been seen since.
Sombath was a leading democracy activist, perhaps the most prominent member of Laos’ small civil society. He specialised in advocating for education of all Laotians, particularly in poor rural areas. Ever since his disappearance, his wife Ng Shui-Meng has led a tireless campaign in search of truth and justice. The following interview with her has been edited for length and clarity.
How has your life and your work changed since your husband’s disappearance?
Since his disappearance, I lost my partner, and I also lost my greatest love. It’s like you have lost something. It’s something which is missing, and for the last 12 years, this loss has remained. It says I’m not complete, and I have to carry this burden. I know I must carry on, and I will have to continue living. And one way to address this is to ensure that how he was disappeared and the circumstances under which he disappeared is made known.
I work with other victims from the region, and I draw support from them. I call them my sisters in pain, because they’ve all lost their husbands, their sons or someone they love very, very dearly, and they understand what it is. And so, we as a group have always spoken up against enforced disappearance. We hope that the world is listening, and more and more people join forces to counter this heinous crime.
To disappear someone, take someone outside the realm of the law, and to never reveal what had happened to them, leaving their family in great distress and loss without ever knowing the truth – this is worse than you could ever know.
A government can arrest a person wrongly and put them in jail, but at least you know that person is in jail. At least you can use the judicial system to try and right the wrong. But when you disappear a person, the person is not available and is hidden from the truth and has no recourse to justice whatsoever.
By removing one, you warn all the others who are trying to work in the area of social justice, or community justice, and it puts fear not only in the family, but in the entire community, so that other people will not stand up if they see any wrong, because they know that if they stand up, they could be targeted. It is a targeted crime, targeted to silence, and targeted to induce fear in the community and in the society.
Despite the passing of time, the pain, the suffering does not go away. It remains as time passes because the fear that he will not come back looms larger and larger. And the hope that he will return also fades. That is why enforced disappearance is the most difficult criminal act against human rights.
What has changed in Laos since your husband’s disappearance?
Nothing very much, though I still appeal for his case, and his case is now with the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances. His case is one of the iconic cases that the working group has been working on. And they raise it every time that Laos goes to the UN and presents its human rights report or [during] the UPR [Universal Periodic Review] process, for example.
People who had fought for their own community against abuses including land grabbing, persecution or even speaking up against injustices – the government has come down very, very heavily on them. Again, it is used as a fear tactic to induce fear and to ensure compliance from the rest of the population.
Laos rarely makes it to international news headlines, why do you think this is?
I think Laos is hardly in the international news for several reasons. One, Laos is a very small country. It is big geographically in terms of land size, but population wise it is only about eight million people. And so, what happens in Laos is not raising the attention of many other countries, partly because it is a small country, and also it is a country of little economic significance in terms of trade.
I think the world should pay attention, especially to smaller countries where human rights abuses or other kinds of abuses are kind of swept under the carpet. I don’t think you need to have a major genocide before the world cameras come in and focus on the issue.
What can our readers do to help?
I think we shouldn’t get too distracted. I think we shouldn’t also be too depressed by what we see. There’s a lot of bad news in the world. The situation is not good all around the globe. We should not look at the bad stuff and despair. And I’ve used that in my own life. I could give up, I could just wallow in my own sorrow, [but] sorrow is a defeatist movement.
We have to have hope. We have to have aspirations, and we have to have compassion for the suffering of the world.
We may not be able to change the world, but if you change ourselves and the people around us for the better and help the people around us or the community around us for the better, I think we can.
Sombath Somphone (right) photographed with Archbishop Desmond Tutu, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, in 2006
The Lao civil society leader disappeared at a police checkpoint in 2012. Foreign governments should not allow his memory to fade.
The enforced disappearance of Lao civil society leader Sombath Somphone is something the government of Laos has consistently tried to avoid talking about, hoping that the passage of time would cause this case to fall into oblivion.
This strategy is destined to fail. Sombath’s case will continue to vex the government and further tarnish its already abysmal human rights record until Vientiane musters the political will to explain where Sombath is and what happened to him. Continue reading “Who’s Afraid of Talking About Sombath Somphone?”
Attacks on Dissidents and Activists; Cross-Border Abuses Persist
Audrey Gregg
United Nations review of Laos’ human rights record showed little progress since the last review about five years ago.
In its fourth Universal Periodic Review (UPR) on April 29, Laos received 271 recommendations from other countries, most of which echoed those of past reviews, underscoring the government’s failure to address longstanding human rights abuses.
In line with concerns from rights groups, such as Human Rights Watch, countries reiterated calls for Laos to investigate attacks and enforced disappearances against dissidents, to ratify the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, and to promote fundamental freedoms of expression, assembly, and association.
Yet the government has continued to target its critics, including activists Savang Phaleuth, whom police detained in April 2023, and Anousa “Jack” Luangsuphom, who was critically wounded later that month in a shooting that has yet to be investigated.
The continual failure of the government to impartially investigate attacks on critics is exemplified by the enforced disappearance of civil society leader Sombath Somphone in 2012. Despite claiming to be investigating his case, the government has never provided updates to Sombath’s family or to the general public.
Other incidents since 2020 have demonstrated the Lao government’s role in quid pro quo “swap mart” agreements with neighboring governments that have facilitated rights abuses against its nationals across its borders and vice versa, known as transnational repression. In May 2023, unidentified assailants shot and killed the exiled Lao political activist Bounsuan Kitiyano in Thailand. Later that year, Laos forcibly returned Chinese human rights lawyer Lu Siwei to China where he has been sentenced to prison. The government has also failed to investigate other cases of presumed transnational repression that predate its last UPR cycle, including the enforced disappearance and presumed killing of five exiled Thai activists in Laos.
During the UN review, the Lao government emphasized the relationship between a country’s development and its promotion of human rights. But Laos has no excuse for not delivering on its rights obligations to cease arbitrary arrests, enforced disappearances, and extrajudicial killings, and by fully and impartially investigating attacks on Sombath Somphone and other dissidents.
The Lao government has until the next UN Human Rights Council session in September 2025 to signal its intention to support and implement the recommendations made during the latest review.
Today, 17 February, marks your 73rd birthday. For the last 12 years, since your abduction in 2012, you have not celebrated your birthday at home with me and the rest of the family. But, every year whenever your birthday comes around, I feel a special tug at my heart, wishing that you are with me at home with your loved ones, as it should be like everyone else.
I can now only imagine that if you are here with us for your birthday, I would be either taking you out for a birthday meal with the family, or making something that you like, like “larb” fish and bamboo shoot soup. Your taste has always been simple, but you always like fresh foods from nature.
My dearest Sombath, now that you are not with us, I can only send you a birthday prayer, praying that wherever you are, you are still well. I can only send you hugs and blessings for happiness, good health and peace. My dearest Sombath, may you be well, may you be happy.
You are not only remembered today on your birthday. You are close to my heart everyday. In fact, with the passing of time, and as I get older, I hold you even closer to me in my heart and in my mind.
Sombath, I just want to let you know that I have set up the Sombath Somphone Memorial Fund (SSMF) to be managed by the Foundation established by your mentor, Ajarn Sulak Sivaraksa. I set up the SSMF to specifically make sure that your passion for supporting education through youth and community engagement will go on.
The SSMF is set up to provide small grants to support young people from the Mekong sub-region who are working on innovative projects in their schools or communities for improvement of learning or livelihoods in their communities.
The SSMF has now completed its second year of operation, and the supported projects are really very creative and interesting, with most projects focusing on innovative and joyful learning for children from migrant or disadvantaged families, and engagement of schools and communities in environmental protection and reforestation, or small animal raising for income improvement and nutritional support to poor families, and so on. The success of these projects has validated your belief that people’s development must be rooted on analysis of their own problems, and solutions must come from people taking actions themselves.
In setting up the SSMF, I also hope that your legacy and ideas will be continued through the work of the younger generation in the region, and your memory be continued into the future.
On 15 December, 2012, Sombath Somphone, an internationally acclaimed community development worker from Laos, was reportedly abducted after being stopped at a police checkpoint in Vientiane.
Surveillance footage shows him being forced into another vehicle and driven away, widely pointing to state security forces as the perpetrators. Despite this evidence, the Lao government denies involvement and claims ignorance of his whereabouts.
Since his disappearance, numerous organisations, rights activists and academics have urged the government to conduct a thorough investigation but have been met with either complete silence or hollow promises of action.
Somphone’s case marks the first high-profile instance of a top-down crackdown on civic space in Laos, exposing both the state’s harrowing silence and the compliance of domestic NGOs.
Ng Shui Meng, Somphone’s wife, has criticised Western media for labelling her husband a “human rights activist,” arguing that such terms misrepresent his work. On a family-run website documenting his life and disappearance, she explained that while Somphone tirelessly worked to improve the lives of the rural poor, his efforts were never confrontational or antagonistic toward government policies, and all his projects were conducted with official approval. Continue reading “In Laos, Activists Don’t Just Speak Out—They Disappear”
A pamphlet about Sombath Somphone sits on display at an event in Bangkok, Thailand, Dec. 15, 2022, marking the 10-year anniversary of his enforced disappearance in Laos.
BANGKOK — Rights groups and activists Monday continued to urge the government of Laos to provide answers about the suspected abduction of prominent rights advocate Sombath Somphone, who was last seen at a police checkpoint in the country’s capital 12 years ago.In CCTV footage captured by a roadside camera on December 15, 2012, in central Vientiane, Sombath is seen being pulled over at a police post, stepping out of his Jeep and getting into a pickup truck that drives him away.
He has not been seen or heard from since. The government of Laos, an authoritarian, one-party communist regime, claims it knows nothing of what happened.
“We continue to ask: Where is Sombath? We continue to say we are not going anywhere. We’re going to continue to demand answers from the Lao government. His is a case of enforced disappearance in the purest form,” Phil Robertson, director of Asia Human Rights and Labor Advocates, said Monday at an event in Bangkok marking the anniversary. Continue reading “Suspected abduction of Lao rights advocate remembered on 12-year anniversary of disappearance”
15 December 2024: On the 12-year anniversary of the unresolved enforced disappearance of Lao civil society leader Sombath Somphone, we, the undersigned civil society organizations and individuals worldwide, urge United Nations (UN) member states to express their concern over this continuing crime and to call for the prompt resolution of Sombath’s case at the upcoming review of the human rights record of Laos.
As UN member states prepare for the fourth Universal Periodic Review (UPR) of Laos, scheduled for April/May 2025 in Geneva, Switzerland, we call on them to reinforce civil society’s long-standing calls for truth and accountability regarding Sombath’s enforced disappearance.
During the second UPR of Laos in January 2015, Sombath Somphone was the subject of recommendations, expressions of concern, and advance questions by 16 UN member states.(1) During the third UPR of Laos in January 2020, seven UN member states formulated recommendations or advance questions on Sombath’s case.(2) Continue reading “Laos: States should ask “Where is Sombath?” at upcoming review of human rights record”
