HRW SLAMS THAI TREATMENT OF MYANMAR REFUGEES
Despite long experience in hosting them for decades, Thailand's treatment of refugees from Myanmar and elsewhere was inadequate and below standard, Human Rights Watch said yesterday.
HRW’s 143-page report entitled “Ad Hoc and Inadequate: Thailand’s Treatment of Refugees and Asylum Seekers”, indicated that Thai refugee policies were not grounded in law and caused refugees of all nationalities to be exploited and unnecessarily detained and deported.
“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, HRW’s refugee programme director and co-author of the report.
Thai authorities regard refugees of all nationalities living outside of designated refugee camps for Myanmar people as being in the country illegally.
The report said some refugees were physically abused by Thai police.
Thailand has sheltered refugees fleeing from conflict at home in Myanmar since the mid-1980s on an ad hoc humanitarian basis.
The country had received refugees from Indochina in the 1970s but has never ratified the Refugee Convention of 1951 and does not have a refugee law or functioning asylum procedures.
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.
Wichean Potephosree, secretary-general of the National Security Council, said he had discussed with Aung Myint, a president’s office minister from Myanmar, when he visited Nay Pyi Taw early this month about the plan to repatriate Myanmar refugees to their place of origin after a peace settlement with armed ethic groups.
The Myanmar government is now clearing landmines and preparing places as well as infrastructure for the return of the refugees, he said. The preparation would take a year and the returnees would also get job training, he said.
Thai investors would be encouraged to build economic zones to create jobs for them, he said.
Phil Robertson, HRW’s deputy director for Asia, said refugees were living in anxiety and concerned about the lack of clear information on the repatriation plan.
People in the camps who communicated back to Myanmar, or surreptitiously left the camps to go check things out, found out that their path to return was blocked with many difficulties.
“Their land has been stolen for a business project or rubber plantation, or the Myanmar army is still in their area and they are afraid of being abused again by soldiers, or there are still landmines,” he said.
However, HRW said repatriation should be conducted on a voluntary basis and hoped Thai and Myanmar authorities were not in a rush and did not want to push refugees back prematurely.
