This roundtable on the COVID-19 “repatriation flights” [chuyến bay giải cứu] corruption trial in Vietnam presents four commentaries on the public prosecution, held in the summer of 2023 in Hà Nội, of over fifty individuals accused of soliciting and paying bribes, embezzlement, and abuse of public office.1 The defendants, some of whom were high-ranking senior officials in the Ministries of Health, Foreign Affairs, and Public Security, were charged with offenses related to their handling of Vietnam’s program of repatriating nationals back to Vietnam in the first two years of the global coronavirus pandemic.
The repatriation flights trial constituted a significant public scandal—one among many high-profile scandals prompted over the past decade in Vietnam by the so-called “blazing furnace” anti-corruption campaign initiated by the late Nguyễn Phú Trọng, general secretary of the Communist Party.2 It was the second major scandal related to the coronavirus pandemic in Vietnam—the...
University of California Press