The abduction and murder of Lao dissidents have become alarmingly frequent, often coinciding with events of national significance.
Less than a year after Laotian activist Joseph Akaravong was stabbed in France, and less than two years since Thao Bua Sawan Prommachan was arrested and then disappeared following a protest in front of the United Nations building in Vientiane, another Lao activist, Bao Mo Khaen, has been killed.
Like many Lao activists, Khaen was an online critic of the government of Laos and the ruling Lao People’s Revolutionary Party (LPRP). On February 14, Khaen was reportedly detained by soldiers in Vientiane and taken to the capital’s Phon Kheng prison. On February 20, Khaen’s body was found in a forested roadside area alongside a damaged motorbike.
With so many Lao activists disappearing or being murdered, it seems there is little need to speculate on the motives for their execution beyond the reality that such actions are now a normative feature of the LPRP’s efforts to impose fear on the population. The killing of activists is unconscionable, but increasingly unexceptional in Laos. Indeed, Khaen had made public statements about his fears of being murdered in 2025.
And yet there is one additional factor that may have contributed to Khaen’s disappearance and suspected subsequent death.
On February 22, Laos held a national election for members of the National Assembly’s 10th legislature and the fifth Provincial People’s Councils. Many people in Laos have little interest in the elections. The LPRP has ruled for more than 50 years without political opposition, and the party pre-selected every electoral candidate. While the election may see some reshuffling of personnel, nobody expects it to bring any meaningful change.
Still, it appears that the LPRP is not taking any chances. Despite some improvements in 2025, Laos continues to struggle with high levels of sovereign debt and a heightened cost of living, and the country’s youth have little prospects for quality jobs and education. Young people are leaving the country in droves – mostly heading to Thailand in search of work – while people across the country continue to be displaced from their land for large-scale infrastructure projects, even as many of those previously displaced, such as families who lost homes and lives in the Xe Pian-Xe Namnoy hydropower saddled D dam collapse or those displaced by the China-Laos high-speed railway, are still waiting for adequate compensation.
For all these reasons, public criticism of the LPRP is growing alongside widening societal discontent and in this context, the attention that elections draw to government failings appears to have created a sense of insecurity amongst the political elite.
The timing of the abduction of regime dissidents often seems to coincide with events of national significance. In 2012, Sombath Somphone’s abduction followed the 12th Asia-Europe Meeting and associated Asia-Europe People’s Forum, as well as a landslide by-election victory by the recently released Aung San Suu Kyi in Myanmar, which unsettled authoritarian states across the region.
In 2024, the disappearance of activists Xaysomphone Chilikham and Thao Bua Sawan Prommachan came during Laos’ ASEAN chairmanship, and the 2023 assassination attempt against Jack Luangsuphom and the killing of Bounsuan Kitiyano were also widely perceived as efforts to suppress dissent before the commencement of Laos’ ASEAN chairmanship.
Since Sombath’s abduction in 2012, there have been at least 10 murders or attempted murders of Lao activists through assassination or enforced disappearances, and at least five Thai political activists have been killed on Lao soil. Collectively, the total figure of 15 activists equates to more than one per year for more than a decade, and it bears noting that the attempted assassination of Joseph Akaravong in 2025 and the killing of Bounsuan Kitiyano in 2023 took place in France and Thailand, respectively.
In many ways, Laos’ performative elections are not particularly newsworthy. But the suspected murder of yet another activist is. Khaen’s killing reinforces what has long been argued by some critics – that unless the international community does more, such extrajudicial killings by the party-state are going to continue. Clearly, the LPRP sees no need to cease such severe human rights abuses.
What Khaen’s murder also tells us is that the LPRP’s effort to silence the people of Laos by killing activists is not working. For every regime critic that is killed, others are willing to take their place. While we are not yet seeing anything like the kind of popular youth uprisings and political protests that have taken place in proximate countries such as Bangladesh, Myanmar, or Thailand – and while there are little to no signs of any mass youth mobilization on the immediate horizon – the young people of Laos are becoming more outspoken.
The tragic death of Khaen shows us that Laos’ youth will no longer be silenced, and that the LPRP has no intent to undertake any reforms that may loosen its authoritarian hold following Sunday’s election.
https://thediplomat.com/2026/02/laos-elections-stained-by-activists-death/
