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.
Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the International Commission of Jurists were among 78 nongovernment groups that also signed an open letter urging the United Nations to press Laos for answers at a coming review of the government’s human rights record next year.
A tireless champion for his country’s impoverished farmers, Sombath won the U.N.’s Human Resource 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, set up a memorial fund in 2022 that awards small grants for projects in Laos and its neighbors, promoting vocational education, environmental sustainability and other causes Sombath had fought for. She also co-founded the Sombath Somphone & Beyond Project to seek answers to the suspected abductions of her husband and others.
On the day Sombath vanished, Ng was driving just ahead of him in another car to join him for dinner at home. Despite the government’s “wall of silence” about why he 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 that he’s alive and wish he will come back,” she said. “I continue to seek answers. I will not give up trying to wait for Sombath to come back until my dying day.”
Hundreds of families across the region could relate.
In its latest annual report, the U.N.’s Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances says it has counted more than 1,130 cases across Southeast Asia since 1980, the majority of which remain unsolved. It defines the practice as an arrest, detention or abduction by state agents or their proxies, and the state’s refusal to either acknowledge the event or to reveal the victim’s fate.
Although many of the cases date back decades, the lack of resolution has lasting consequences, said Sunai Phasuk, a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch in Thailand.
“It has created a sense of impunity that wrongdoers can continue their wrongdoings and get away with their crimes. And in parallel to that, the climate of fear … has been reinforc[ed],” he said.
In Laos, Ng said, the space for even mild dissent has only shrunk since her husband’s disappearance, out of fear that the same could happen to those who would follow in his footsteps.
She said precious few even dare to try anymore.
“So, it is not very hopeful in terms of activism or people raising issues of concern on any kind of sensitive area,” said Ng. “Everybody knows where the limit is and people are even stepping back way, way behind the line. ... They’re not even testing the line.”
Phasuk said enforced disappearance has become a common feature of the so-called swap mart the governments are allegedly running by returning each other’s wanted dissidents regardless of the persecution they may face back home.
“Assassination, abduction and enforced disappearance seem to be grouped together in this network of transnational repression in mainland Southeast Asia,” he said.
In a 2024 report, Human Rights Watch chronicled 25 confirmed or suspected cases of cross-border repression in the region, including disappearances, over the previous decade.
Sombath’s case in particular, though, 12 years on, continues to serve as a bellwether in the search for answers in those cases.
“I hope that we’re not here next year doing this,” Robertson said. “I would like to see a breakthrough in this case. I want to have an event midyear where we say we’ve now found out what’s going on. … But if we have to be here next December, we will be.”
