Thai treatment of refugees is inadequate, Human Right Watch says
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Despite decades of experience, Thailand's treatment of refugees from Myanmar and elsewhere is still inadequate and below standards, Human Rights Watch said in a report released Thursday.
The 143-page report, "Ad Hoc and Inadequate: Thailand's Treatment of Refugees and Asylum Seekers," indicates that Thai refugee policies are not grounded in law and cause refugees of all nationalities to be exploited and unnecessarily detained and deported.
The report focuses on the plight of Myanmar refugees, the largest current refugee group in Thailand. It examines treatment and conditions of refugees both inside the camps on the border and outside the camps, who are not officially recognised as refugees.
“Thailand presents refugees with the unfair choice of stagnating for years in remote refugee camps or living and working outside the camps without protection from arrest and deportation,” said Bill Frelick, Refugee Programme director at Human Rights Watch and co-author of the report.
“Refugees from other countries are barely tolerated, and Thai authorities sometimes arrest and detain them indefinitely.”
Thailand has sheltered refugees who fled from conflict at home in Myanmar since the early 1980s on an adhoc humanitarian basis. The country had earlier received refugees from Indochina since the 1970s but has never ratified the 1951 Refugee Convention and does not have a refugee law or functioning asylum procedures.
It regards refugees of all nationalities living outside of designated refugee camps for Myanmar as being in the country illegally.
The Thai government has registered as refugees only about 60 per cent of the 140,000 people in the nine refugee camps along the Myanmar border, and minimally protects those it has registered as long as they remain there, the report said.
The government, which has registered very few refugee cases in the camps since mid-2006, has yet to register the remaining 40 per cent of the camps' populations, leaving them particularly vulnerable.
Myanmar migrants outside the camps are subject to arrest and immediate deportation unless they present themselves not as refugees but as migrant workers, and go through the expensive, difficult, and often corrupt process for obtaining migrant worker status.
“Thailand should provide all asylum seekers with a fair chance to have their refugee claims heard and should allow refugees to move about and work,” Frelick said. “This would enable refugees to learn skills and reduce opportunities for exploitation, while allowing them to contribute to Thailand’s economy.”
