BANGKOK – Thailand has no plan to deport 48 Uyghurs who have languished for more than a decade in detention, a government spokesman said on Thursday, dismissing speculation that the men were about to be sent back to China where rights groups say they would face the risk of torture.
The men from the mostly Muslim minority from the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China have been held at Thailand’s Immigration Detention Center since 2014, after attempting to escape Beijing’s persecution through Thailand.
The rights group Justice for All said recently that reports from the detained Uyghurs indicated that Thai authorities were coercing them to fill out forms in preparation for their deportation.
An Immigration Bureau spokesperson told Radio Free Asia last week that no decision had been made regarding the Uyghurs, and a government spokesman reiterated on Thursday that no deportation was planned.
“There is no policy to do so. I don’t understand why there’s been talk about this,” spokesman Jirayu Huangsab told RFA.
“I have nothing to clarify,” Jirayu said, when asked about Thailand’s position on the issue. He also questioned the source of the information of “the person who blew the whistle about this.”
U.N. experts on Tuesday joined rights groups in raising concern about the Uyghurs, urging Thailand to halt their deportation to China.
“The treatment of the Uyghur minority in China is well-documented,” said the experts, collectively known as the Special Procedures of the U.N.’s Human Rights Council. “We are concerned they are at risk of suffering irreparable harm, in violation of the international prohibition on refoulement to torture.”
The prohibition on refoulement prevents returning detainees to a country “where there is real risk of torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”
Uyghurs in China’s vast Xinjiang region have been subjected to widespread human rights abuses, including detention in massive concentration camps.
The U.N. experts also called on Thailand to provide access to asylum procedures and medical care for the group of detained Uyghurs “without delay.”
Rubio promised intervention
The group of refugees is part of an originally larger cohort of over 350 Uyghur men, women and children, 172 of whom were resettled in Turkey, 109 deported back to China, and five who died because of inadequate medical conditions.
In 2015, Thailand, Washington’s longest-standing treaty ally in Asia, faced stiff international criticism for those it did deport back to China.
Thailand is not a signatory to the 1951 U.N. Refugee Convention, and therefore does not recognize refugees.
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New U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said at his confirmation hearing last week that he would reach out to U.S. ally Thailand to prevent the return of the Uyghurs to China.
The treatment of Uyghurs in China was not “some obscure issue” that should be on the sidelines of U.S.-China ties, Rubio said.
“These are people who are basically being rounded up because of their ethnicity and religion, and they are being put into camps. They’re being put into what they call re-education centers. They’re being stripped of their identity. Their children’s names are being changed,” he said.
“It’s one of the most horrifying things that’s ever happened,” he added.
“They’re being put into forced labor – literally slave labor.”
China denies accusations of slave labor in Xinjiang.
Edited by Taejun Kang and Mike Firn.