In the early hours of September 15, Khieo Lapchanh, a 26-year-old Lao content creator, finished his shift at a restaurant in Thailand’s Samut Sakhon province and vanished. The following day, he was due at the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) for his first asylum registration interview. He never arrived.

Khieo came to Thailand in 2019 and late last year began posting Facebook videos sharply critical of the Lao government. Within months, his Khiew Channel Facebook page had amassed some 159,000 followers. Among his targets was the Siphandone dynasty, whose hold on high office runs from former president Khamtay Siphandone to his son, Prime Minister Sonexay Siphandone, and his daughter, Vice President Viengthong Siphandone.

The backlash was swift. Khieo was doxxed, depicted in violent AI-manipulated content and subjected to death threats, including a $8,000 bounty on his life. Fearing for his safety after Lao officials twice visited his mother’s home, he withdrew from public activism. Silence, however, offered little protection.

A Familiar Pattern

Khieo is far from the first Lao dissident to vanish or die in Thailand while seeking UNHCR protection. In August 2019, Od Sayavong, a member of the Free Lao group, disappeared in Bangkok while awaiting resettlement to a third country, and Thai police concede that their investigation has made no progress. In May 2023, the body of Bounsuan Kitiyano, a UNHCR-recognized refugee and fellow Free Lao member, was found near the Lao border in Ubon Ratchathani province with three gunshot wounds. He had been planning to move to Australia, and no one has been held accountable for his killing.

The timing of these cases suggests that Lao authorities are closely monitoring activists’ engagement with UNHCR, and that they are prepared to use violence to stop their critics from reaching the safety of a third country.

These cases also expose Thailand’s failure to protect those seeking refuge within its borders. In a 2024 report, Human Rights Watch analyzed 25 cases of transnational repression in Thailand since the 2014 military coup, finding that refugees and asylum seekers have faced surveillance, violence, abductions, enforced disappearances, and forced returns facilitated by the Thai government. The report describes a “swap mart” in which foreign dissidents sheltering in Thailand are effectively traded for critics of the Thai government living abroad.

Thailand’s legal framework compounds this vulnerability. Because the country is not a party to the 1951 Refugee Convention, asylum seekers are treated as illegal immigrants and remain liable to deportation. In January 2022, another member of the Free Laos group, Khoukham Keomanivong, was arrested in Thailand for overstaying his visa (despite holding a UNHCR card) and only narrowly avoided deportation to Laos following intervention by civil society actors.

A Global Problem

Responsibility for Khieo’s disappearance does not rest with Laos, or Thailand, alone. On September 23, just eight days after Khieo disappeared, more than 130 U.N. human rights experts issued a joint statement urging states to prevent and combat transnational repression and calling for expedited asylum, resettlement and humanitarian visa processes for those at risk. They also warned that such repression is increasingly digital, deploying social media, spyware and malware.

The cross-border targeting of activists is part of a broader global democratic retreat in which many states are culpable. Freedom House reports that global freedom declined in 2025 for the 20th consecutive year, while CIVICUS finds that just 7 percent of the world’s population lives in countries with open or relatively open civic space. Laos fares poorly on both, scoring 13 out of 100 in Freedom House’s index and rated “closed” by CIVICUS. Nor does the threat to Lao activists end at Thailand’s borders. In June 2025, exiled activist Joseph Akaravong was stabbed in the throat and torso in Pau, France, in what the local prosecutor described as an attempted assassination.

China has long been identified as a force for authoritarian consolidation in Southeast Asia and it is the largest source of development assistance and investment in Laos. But China is not the only country with responsibility to bear. In 2025, after Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency set its sights on USAID, the Trump administration cancelled 83 percent of the agency’s programs. Human Rights Watch reports that safe houses for at-risk human rights defenders in authoritarian countries have closed as a result. Manushya, the organization supporting Khieo, had relied on U.S. government funding to run nine safe houses for activists from neighboring states, including Laos and Cambodia, and its founder warned that without that funding it could no longer protect activists facing transnational repression. The sector is now understaffed and under-resourced, leaving activists less safe. The United States must reinvest heavily in human rights protection in Southeast Asia, and other democracies must increase their funding.

The Real Story of 2026

On November 24, Laos is scheduled to graduate from least developed country status, a milestone that will no doubt be marked with much fanfare. Yet it must not be forgotten that the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party has ruled for five decades without organized opposition, independent civil society or independent media, and that since Sombath Somphone’s shocking abduction in 2012, there have been at least 10 murders or attempted murders of Lao activists. Any celebration of the country’s graduation must be accompanied by this story.

Another accompaniment to the graduation toasts is a recognition that young Laotians are no longer willing to remain silent about the lack of freedom and opportunity in their country. Each dissident killed or disappeared only deepens convictions that activism is necessary. The party may continue to silence individual critics, but others will continue to speak out – and those who do not confront the government directly are protesting with their feet. Freedom House notes that Laos’ economic crisis has prompted growing youth emigration, with Lao nationals now the largest group using Thailand’s formal labor migration channel; they now total 267,871, or 40 percent of the total, a figure that continues to rise. In one Xayaburi district, 1,039 of 5,632 high school students dropped out in a single year to find work, and the true number of young Lao leaving is considerably higher once irregular migrants are counted. Their departure is a protest against a government that is failing to offer them a future.

The final lesson of Khieo’s disappearance is one for Lao activists themselves: they must build stronger solidarity. In May, a prominent U.S.-based Lao activist posted a video stating that Khieo was alive and working at a restaurant in Thailand, and shortly before he vanished, it was circulating online once more. This is not the first time an activist has been exposed in this way. When Anousa “Jack” Luangsuphom was shot in Vientiane in 2023, his family initially reported him dead, fearing that the gunman would return if he learned Jack had survived. Within days, news that he was alive in hospital became public and was shared online by a fellow activist. Rivalries and egos among Lao activists only undermine their shared cause and leave everyone less safe. To succeed, they will need to work together.