Do we like Tô Lâm?
Our score: 2 out of 10. Human Rights Watch says the police he ran jailed critics and the pace has not eased since he took the top job, and the good set against that is thin.
Tô Lâm is the son of a senior police officer, and he built his whole career in the security services. He studied security and law, earned a law PhD, became public security minister in 2016 and a four-star general, and joined the Politburo in 2021. He took the presidency in May 2024 and the party's top job after Nguyen Phu Trong died that July.
The old stories follow him. Radio Free Asia reports he was accused of involvement in the 2017 kidnapping of fugitive oil executive Trinh Xuan Thanh in Berlin, which Vietnam denied, though it caused a rift with Germany. In 2021 a video showed him eating gold-plated steak at a London restaurant, and RFA says a noodle seller who mocked him in a parody post was arrested and jailed.
The harm check is a split result. We found nothing from him on LGBTQ+ people or women, so there is no campaign against either group on the record we read. On climate he has called environmental protection and climate adaptation central to the new development model. The black mark is the one Human Rights Watch keeps making: scores of dissidents were wrongly imprisoned on its account while he ran the police, and he has not eased off since.
The numbers are grim. HRW says courts convicted and sentenced at least 43 rights campaigners in 2024, and at least 28 more in the first nine months of 2026, with at least 39 others arrested. It puts the count of political prisoners at more than 160, and says Vietnam has not delivered on labour reforms it promised in trade deals.
Supporters can point to a big reform push. He cut layers of government in an overhaul that cost nearly 150,000 officials their jobs, and he backs the private sector as the economy's driving force. Critics quoted by Reuters say the benefits go to a narrow group of well-connected firms, and that the security apparatus has gained power. His anti-graft pledge is also read two ways: he promises that all wrongdoings must be dealt with, while analysts note that similar drives elsewhere have been used to remove rivals.
On the good side of the ledger there is not much we could verify. We found no charity work, and no case of him standing up for anyone at a cost to himself. The climate and reform talk is real policy, but it comes from a leader of a one-party state where dissent is outlawed and the media are state-controlled. That is honestly the whole list.