The Vietnamese government should investigate the death under suspicious circumstances of a senior Tibetan lama, Humkar Dorje Rinpoche, in Ho Chi Minh City on March 29, 2025, Human Rights Watch said today.
Humkar Dorje, 56, died following months of concern by the Tibetan community about his whereabouts and well-being. His followers in India, where many Tibetans live in exile, allege that Vietnamese and Chinese authorities had arrested him in Vietnam after he fled Tibet. His monastery, which is under official supervision, instead claimed that he died from illness while on a retreat.
"Humkar Dorje Rinpoche's death in Vietnam is especially concerning given the Chinese government's severe repression of Tibetans and its record of snatching its nationals in Vietnam," said Maya Wang, associate China director at Human Rights Watch. "The Vietnamese authorities should credibly and impartially investigate these claims and take appropriate action, including by providing autopsy findings to Humkar Dorje's family."
Humkar Dorje was head of the Lung Ngon monastery in Gabde county in the Golok Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture of Qinghai province. He had thousands of devotees inside China and abroad, including in Vietnam. He was a prominent educator, having founded, with official permission and oversight, a vocational school and more than 10 other schools in the region, where he sponsored the education of local children.
Humkar Dorje's disappearance and death occurred amid a Chinese government crackdown on prominent Tibetan educators and the schools that they run, which promote Tibetan language and culture, in eastern Tibetan areas including Golok.
Humkar Dorje had been missing since at least November 2024, according to Tibetan exile media. When people in Gabde county expressed concern about him in December, local authorities reportedly banned all discussion of the issue in public. The silence ended on April 1 when officials in Gabde county showed representatives of the monastery a death certificate issued by a hospital in Ho Chi Minh City.
