The Human Rights Measurement Initiative (HRMI), a global collaborative project involving human rights practitioners and academics, has released its 2025 data on the state of human rights in Việt Nam. The latest scores, derived from expert surveys and national statistics, paint a worrying picture of stagnation and repression. While Quality of Life metrics remain fair, citizens’ rights concerning Safety from the State and personal Empowerment continue to be severely violated, with specific ethnic, religious, and political groups consistently identified as being most at risk.

Understanding the Scores

HRMI uses two distinct methodologies. For economic and social rights, such as health and education, the SERF Index is used to measure a country’s performance against what should be possible at its income level. For civil and political rights, where violations often occur in secret, HRMI uses multilingual surveys to gather information directly from human rights experts monitoring the country. Scores are also accompanied by general labels like “Good,” “Fair,” “Bad,” and “Very Bad” to provide context.