Delite
Hanoi, Vietnam, 12 July 2025 – The International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) and the Institute of Biology (IB), under the Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology (VAST), this week held a laboratory handover ceremony in Hanoi to mark the transfer of advanced DNA identification equipment and materials. This is part of a collaboration designed to strengthen Vietnam’s capacity to identify human remains from the war era.
Held to coincide with the 30th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the United States and Vietnam, the ceremony represents a significant milestone in cooperation between ICMP and Vietnamese institutions, which supports national efforts to identify more than 300,000 unidentified human remains and offers renewed hope to families who have waited decades for answers.
“The equipment we are handing over today symbolizes far more than technical cooperation,” said John Terzano, a member of ICMP’s Panel of Experts and a U.S. Navy veteran. “It represents our shared, human commitment to addressing the devastating legacy of war: the families who are still waiting for news of their loved ones.”
“This partnership not only brings hope to countless Vietnamese families,” he added, “it sends a powerful message: that even after conflict, nations can choose cooperation over division and compassion over bitterness.”
Under the project launched in 2022, ICMP has supported IB-VAST in developing and applying advanced forensic technologies, including Next Generation Sequencing (NGS), to extract DNA profiles from highly degraded bone samples. This has been complemented by the introduction of data analysis tools, with the goal of establishing an automated system to process a large number of samples.
The collaboration between ICMP scientists and their Vietnamese counterparts is a vital step toward achieving the Government of Vietnam’s goal of identifying hundreds of thousands of war-era missing.
ICMP’s program in Vietnam is supported by the Government of the United States.
About ICMP
ICMP is a treaty-based intergovernmental organization with Headquarters in The Hague, the Netherlands. Its mandate is to secure the cooperation of governments and others in locating missing persons from conflict, human rights abuses, disasters, organized crime, migration and other causes and to assist them in doing so.
