On September 18, Nguyen Quang A was barred from leaving the country to travel to Australia. In a separate trip, planned for early October, he hoped to travel to Brussels, to attend an EU hearing about human rights. He was stopped, searched, and questioned by security officers, and held for six hours total — even though his destination for this trip was not related to the EU hearing. He said this was the 20th time his travel was restricted since 2014. Later, in October, Nguyen Quang A was scheduled to appear as a representative of Vietnamese civil society at the EU Parliament's hearing on the issue of EU-Vietnam Free Trade Agreement in Brussels. However, in order prevent him from attending that important meeting, police had confiscated his passport on September 18, 2018 and gave him back an edited passport - they used a pen to manually change his year of birth from 1946 into 1949. A only realized the issue on the morning of October 8, after the repeated reminders from a state official to check his documents. Later that same day, Nguyen Quang A still went to the airport with the old, edited passport. Suddenly, an official of Ministry of Public Security appeared and gave him another brand-new passport. A few hours later, Nguyen Quang A finally boarded the airplane headed to Brussels.