Pressure built on Thailand Thursday over the detention of a detained Vietnamese dissident fighting extradition back home with one human rights official warning of a stain on the government if it deported him.
Y Quynh Bdap, from Vietnam’s Ede minority, was detained on June 11 and is being held in a special prison in Bangkok while a court decides his fate.
In January, Vietnam sentenced the 32-year-old to 10 years in prison in absentia on terrorism charges, accusing him of involvement in 2023 attacks on two public agencies in Dak Lak province in which nine people were killed.
Bdap has been in Thailand since 2018 and denied any involvement in the 2023 attacks. The U.N. refugee agency has recognised him as a “person of concern”.
“Put simply, if he is sent back, chances are he dies, disappears, is tortured. That will stain the hands of the Thai government,” Sunai Phasuk, senior researcher at Human Rights Watch, told a seminar in Bangkok.
The Thai government did not respond to a request for comment from Radio Free Asia.
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Sunai said the terrorism charges that Bdap is facing at home did not meet international standards of justice. Referring to a previous military government in Thailand that was intolerant of dissent, he said he questioned the behavior of the civilian administration that replaced it.
On July 15, a Bangkok court postponed Bdap’s extradition hearing until Aug. 1, He is also facing an immigration offense related to overstaying his visa.
Bdap’s lawyer, Nadthasiri Bergman, told a hearing this month the case reflected intensified transnational repression, through which governments exert their influence across borders to silence dissent.
A Thai senator, Angkhana Neelapaijit, told the seminar that Thailand should live up to international standards on human rights, ratify the 1951 Refugee Convention, update its immigration law to take into account enforced disappearance and torture, and insist that all extradition requests from other countries go through its Court of Justice.
Thailand and Vietnam have not signed an extradition treaty but regularly exchange each other’s nationals on a reciprocal basis.
Vietnamese officials have not made a public comment on Bdap’s case but Sunai and Bergman said they believed Vietnam was exerting pressure for the extradition case to be resolved in their country’s favor.
Edited by Mike Firn.