Rights groups and activists on Monday continued to urge Laos’ government 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.
CCTV footage captured by a roadside camera in central Vientiane on December 15, 2012, shows Sombath pulling up to a police checkpoint, getting out of his jeep and climbing into a pickup truck that takes him away Is going.
Since then he was neither seen nor heard from. The government of Laos, an authoritarian, one-party communist regime, claims it has no knowledge of what happened.
“We keep asking: where is Sombath? We kept saying that we were not going anywhere. We will continue to demand answers from the Lao government. “This is a case of enforced disappearance in its purest form,” Phil Robertson, director of Asia Human Rights and Labor Advocates, said at an event in Bangkok on Monday to mark the anniversary.
Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the International Commission of Jurists were among 78 non-governmental groups that signed an open letter urging the United Nations to include the government in its upcoming review of the government’s human rights record next year. Pressured to answer.
A tireless champion for his country’s poor farmers, Sombath won the United Nations Human Resources Development Award in 2001 and Asia’s prestigious Ramon Magsaysay Award for community leadership four years later.
To help carry on Sombath’s legacy, his wife, Shui Meng Ng, established a memorial fund in 2022, which provides small grants for projects in Laos and its neighbors, promoting vocational education, Environmental sustainability and other causes for which Sombath fought. She also co-founded the Sombath Somphone and Beyond Project to seek answers to the suspected abductions of her husband and others.
On the day Sombath disappeared, Ng was driving in another car right ahead of her to attend a dinner at Ng’s house. Despite the government’s “wall of silence” about why she never made it, she continues to wait.
“I still need to know what happened to Sombath, whether he is even alive. I need the truth,” Ng, who traveled from Laos to Thailand for Monday’s event, told VOA.
“I still hope he’s alive and wish he comes back,” she said. “I continue to search for answers. “I will never stop waiting for Sombath’s return until the day I die.”
Hundreds of families from across the region can join it.
In its latest annual report, the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances says it has counted more than 1,130 cases in Southeast Asia since 1980, the majority of which remain unresolved. It defines the practice as arrest, detention or abduction by state agents or their representatives, and the state’s refusal to acknowledge the incident or reveal the fate of the victim.
Sunai Phasuk, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch in Thailand, said that although many of the cases date back decades, the lack of resolution has lasting consequences.
“This has created a sense of impunity that wrongdoers can continue their wrongdoings and get away with their crimes. And parallel to this, an atmosphere of fear… has become stronger[ed],” He said.
The space for even mild dissent has diminished in Laos since her husband’s disappearance, Ng said, fearing the same could happen to those who follow in his footsteps.
He said that precious people now even have the courage to try harder.
“So, it’s not very optimistic in terms of activism or people raising issues of concern on any kind of sensitive area,” Ng said. “Everyone knows where the limit is and people are going far beyond the limit. …They’re not even testing the line.”
Fasuq said enforced disappearances have become a common feature of the so-called swap marts that governments allegedly run by returning wanted dissidents to each other, even if they face persecution at home.
“Murder, kidnappings and enforced disappearances appear to be grouped together in this network of international repression in mainland Southeast Asia,” he said.
In a 2024 report, Human Rights Watch detailed 25 confirmed or suspected cases of cross-border repression in the region, including disappearances, over the past decade.
However, the Sombath case in particular is, even after 12 years, serving as a harbinger in the search for answers in those cases.
“I hope we don’t have that happen here next year,” Robertson said. “I would like to see a breakthrough in this case. I want to have an event in the middle of the year where we say we now know what’s going on. …But if we have to be here next December, we will be.