Overview
The Socialist Republic of Vietnam (Cộng hòa xã hội chủ nghĩa Việt Nam) has no bilateral extradition treaty with the Federal Republic of Germany. Vietnam is neither a contracting state to the European Convention on Extradition nor an EU member; the European Arrest Warrant does not apply. Extradition relations are therefore assessed exclusively on a treaty-free basis under Sections 1 ff. IRG and under the Vietnamese statute on international mutual legal assistance (Law on Mutual Legal Assistance, 2007). Under Section 5 IRG, extradition requires a formal assurance of reciprocity from Vietnam.
Formal Vietnamese extradition requests to Germany are numerically rare — a request from 2008 was refused by the German side, and a further request from 2017 was resolved out of court. In practice, however, Vietnam is highly relevant as a one-party state in which the judiciary is not independent and in which politically and economically charged proceedings are conducted under considerable state influence. The focus is on economic, corruption and drug offenses as well as — politically especially sensitive — proceedings against regime critics, bloggers and human-rights defenders.
How little confidence in Vietnamese rule-of-law assurances is justified has been demonstrated in drastic fashion on German soil: the abduction of the asylum seeker Trinh Xuan Thanh from Berlin in July 2017 by Vietnamese agents triggered a serious diplomatic crisis between the two states (see below). The defense in Vietnam constellations is therefore shaped by several structural features: the continuing death penalty (Section 8 IRG), desolate detention conditions and documented torture (Section 73 sentence 1 IRG in conjunction with Article 3 ECHR), and persecution on political grounds without independent courts (Section 6 IRG).
Legal basis
In the absence of an international agreement, the Act on International Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters (IRG) of 23 Dec 1982 applies directly on the German side. Treaty-free extradition requires an assurance of reciprocity under Section 5 IRG; under Section 3 IRG, dual criminality is required (the offense must carry a maximum penalty of more than one year's imprisonment, or, in the case of enforcement, at least four months of the sentence remaining to be served). Political, military and purely fiscal offenses are subject to the bars of Sections 6 and 7 IRG.
For German citizens, extradition to Vietnam is excluded under Article 16(2) of the Basic Law in conjunction with Section 80 IRG; the relaxation provided by Section 80 IRG applies only to extraditions to EU member states. This blocking effect also applies to German–Vietnamese dual nationals (cf. BVerfGE 113, 273 — European Arrest Warrant I). Multiple nationality has been permissible without a retention permit since the Citizenship Modernization Act of 27 June 2024; this does not affect the blocking effect of Article 16(2) of the Basic Law.
On the Vietnamese side, substantive criminal law is based on the 2015 Criminal Code (in force since 2018, amended several times). The central authority in extradition matters is the Ministry of Justice (Bộ Tư pháp), acting together with the Supreme People's Procuracy (Viện kiểm sát nhân dân tối cao) and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; jurisdiction lies with the People's Courts. Because Vietnam is a one-party state led by the Communist Party, the courts are not independent of the party and the executive — a circumstance that must be taken into account when assessing reciprocity and any assurance. On the German side, the Higher Regional Courts decide on admissibility (Sections 13 ff. IRG); the granting decision is made by the General Public Prosecutor's Offices, and in cases of fundamental importance or foreign-policy significance by the Federal Office of Justice in agreement with the Federal Foreign Office.
Country-specific issues in Vietnam
Abduction of Trinh Xuan Thanh in 2017 — breach of trust on German soil: The former manager of the state-owned company PetroVietnam, Trinh Xuan Thanh, had fled to Germany and applied for asylum here. On 23 July 2017 he was abducted in Berlin's Tiergarten by members of the Vietnamese intelligence service and taken to Vietnam via third countries, where on 22 January 2018 he was sentenced to life imprisonment. The German government characterized the incident as an "unprecedented and blatant breach of German and international law," expelled Vietnamese diplomats and suspended the strategic partnership; one participant in the act was convicted by the Berlin Court of Appeal (Kammergericht) in 2018. This case directly demonstrates that diplomatic assurances from Vietnamese authorities cannot form a sound basis for an extradition.
Death penalty — continuing despite the 2025 reform: Vietnam continues to carry out the death penalty; executions have been performed by lethal injection since 2011. With effect from 1 July 2025 the National Assembly reduced the number of capital offenses from 18 to 10 and converted, among others, drug trafficking, embezzlement, taking bribes and espionage into life imprisonment. For serious offenses such as murder, terrorism and high treason, however, the death penalty remains in place. For 2024 Amnesty International documented 150 death sentences (121 of them for drug offenses) and more than 1,200 people on death row; the number of executions is a state secret. The last official figures (2013–2016: 429 executions) ranked Vietnam, behind China and Iran, as one of the world's most active executioner states. Where the offense charged is one of these, extradition under Section 8 IRG is permissible only subject to an effective, verifiable assurance — which, given the secrecy and the absence of a monitoring mechanism, is in practice impossible to obtain.
One-party state and political persecution: Vietnam is a one-party state without an independent judiciary; human-rights defenders, bloggers, environmental activists and government critics are sentenced to long prison terms on the basis of broadly drafted "national security" offenses (in particular Article 117 — "propaganda against the state" — and Article 331 of the Criminal Code). Human Rights Watch and the US State Department document for 2024 the conviction of numerous activists as well as politically motivated pre-trial detention, coerced confessions and, in individual cases, forced committal to psychiatric institutions. Such proceedings are a bar to extradition under Section 6(1) IRG (political offense) and Section 6(2) IRG (threatened persecution on account of political conviction, religion or membership of a social group) — even where a request is ostensibly based on ordinary criminal charges.
Anti-corruption and economic-crime campaign ("blazing furnace"): The Communist Party's anti-corruption campaign, conducted for years, has produced spectacular proceedings — for instance the death sentence imposed on the entrepreneur Truong My Lan (April 2024) for economic offenses. Such proceedings are often intertwined with internal party power struggles and are conducted before courts that are not independent. In the case of economic-crime requests, both dual criminality (Section 3 IRG) and a possible background of political persecution (Section 6 IRG) must therefore be examined carefully.
Abuse of Interpol: Where the facts have political connotations, an arrest based on a Vietnamese Red Notice or diffusion is possible in Germany or in a transit country abroad. Under Article 3 of Interpol's Constitution, any activity of a political, military, religious or racial character is prohibited; politically motivated notices can be challenged through the Commission for the Control of INTERPOL's Files (CCF). Where there is a connection to Vietnam, an impending arrest must be averted early through a CCF application, a protective brief filed with the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) and the Federal Office of Justice, and consular precautions.
Detention conditions and the human-rights review
Detention conditions in the Vietnamese prison system are documented by numerous independent sources (US State Department Human Rights Report, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International) as seriously contrary to human rights. Reports describe ill-treatment and torture by security forces at the point of arrest, during interrogation and in detention in order to extract confessions, prolonged pre-trial detention without sufficient access to defense counsel, transfer to remote facilities to isolate detainees from relatives, solitary confinement as a means of pressure, as well as inadequate medical care and the denial of treatment to political prisoners. Overcrowding and poor hygienic conditions are widespread.
It follows from German case law that, in the case of an extradition to Vietnam, the standard of review developed for Article 3 ECHR / Article 4 of the EU Charter (Aranyosi/Căldăraru, ECJ C-404/15 and C-659/15 PPU — to be applied as the standard even outside the European Arrest Warrant) will regularly weigh decisively against admissibility. A mere diplomatic assurance ("humane treatment") is insufficient in the absence of a monitoring mechanism; what would be required is a concrete, facility-specific assurance capable of being monitored by the German Embassy in Hanoi. Particularly in the light of the abduction of Trinh Xuan Thanh, however, the reliability of Vietnamese assurances is fundamentally called into question.
Consular assistance is provided through the German Embassy in Hanoi on the basis of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations of 24 Apr 1963 (VCCR). For German–Vietnamese dual nationals there is a risk — as in other one-party states — that consular access will be obstructed or refused, because Vietnam may treat dual nationals within the country as exclusively its own citizens. Effective monitoring of treatment after surrender would thus not be guaranteed precisely in the most vulnerable constellations.
Lines of defense
The defense in Vietnam extradition proceedings, where structured by a lawyer at an early stage, is regularly promising. Review grid:
- Section 6(2) IRG (threatened political persecution): Must be examined wherever there is a connection to the opposition, human-rights work, blogging/journalism, or religious or ethnic minorities — in a one-party state regularly a bar to extradition. It also covers a request that is ostensibly "criminal" or "economic" but conceals a persecutory purpose.
- Section 6(1) IRG (political offense): Relevant in the case of national-security offenses such as Article 117 ("propaganda against the state") or Article 331 of the Criminal Code.
- Section 73 sentence 1 IRG in conjunction with Article 3 ECHR (torture/detention conditions): Regularly the decisive argument. Systematically introduce the reports of the US State Department, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International on torture in custody and on detention conditions into the admissibility proceedings; obstructed consular access for dual nationals as an additional bar.
- Section 8 IRG (death penalty): Where the charges carry a continuing threat of the death penalty (murder, terrorism, high treason), extradition is permissible only subject to an effective, monitorable assurance — which, given the secrecy of the execution figures, is in practice impossible to obtain. The reform of 1 July 2025 (abolition of the death penalty for, among others, drug trafficking) changes nothing in this respect for the remaining offenses.
- Article 16(2) of the Basic Law in conjunction with Section 80 IRG: Where the person holds German citizenship — including German–Vietnamese dual nationals — extradition is excluded.
- Section 3 IRG (dual criminality): Vietnamese national-security and "propaganda" offenses have no German counterpart — extradition is inadmissible to that extent. In the case of economic offenses, a careful mirror-image review is required.
- Section 5 IRG (reciprocity): No treaty — a formal, reliable assurance of reciprocity is required; its reliability must be assessed critically in the light of the Trinh Xuan Thanh case.
- Section 11 IRG (rule of specialty): In treaty-free extradition, this must be secured separately; a concrete listing of the offenses granted, with supplementary requests permitted only upon renewed consent.
- Section 9 IRG (double jeopardy / ne bis in idem): Where there are parallel investigations in Germany or in third countries, examine the blocking effect.
- Interpol/CCF: Challenge a politically motivated Red Notice or diffusion under Article 3 of Interpol's Constitution; an early CCF deletion application, a protective brief filed with the BKA and the Federal Office of Justice.
- Constitutional complaint with an urgent application (Section 32 BVerfGG): After the OLG has declared the extradition admissible, the standard remedy in the event of violations of fundamental rights (Article 1(1), Article 2(2), Article 25 of the Basic Law in conjunction with Article 3 ECHR); where the detention-conditions and persecution objections have been carefully worked up, the prospects of success are not slight.
Legal representation in Vietnamese extradition proceedings
An extradition case is a specialized mutual-legal-assistance procedure that goes beyond classic criminal defense. Engaging a defense lawyer specialized in extradition law at an early stage is regularly decisive — not only after the formal extradition arrest warrant has been issued, but already from the moment of an arrest based on an Interpol notice, an SIS alert or a European Arrest Warrant.
As a Certified Specialist in Criminal Law with a focus on extradition law, I advise and represent affected persons nationwide before the competent Higher Regional Courts and in constitutional complaint proceedings before the Federal Constitutional Court.