Thailand has accepted 48 Uyghurs, requesting refugee status from China, but the United Nations (UN) has allegedly refused to provide aid. As Live Action News has reported, China has been carrying out forced abortion, sterilization, and birth control on Uyghur Muslims. The Chinese government has also been abusing the Uyghur people, using them for forced labor, torturing them, and killing them. A public tribunal established by a British human rights attorney determined in 2021 that China has committed genocide and crimes against humanity in its ongoing treatment of the Uyghur people.
Radio Free Asia and The New Humanitarian reported that Uyghurs fled China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in 2013 and 2014, hoping to be resettled in Turkey. This is a popular route for Uyghurs attempting to reach safety, but many have been held in Bangkok’s Suan Phlu immigration detention center. In order for these refugees to be released to another country, they need approval from the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which Thailand said they have been denied.
UNHCR has claimed for years that Thailand has refused to give proper documents to allow resettlement, but internal documents now reveal that Thailand has been petitioning UNHCR since 2020, asking for a more active role to be taken in the resettlement process. These requests were allegedly refused. “The documents show that UNHCR has failed to uphold its mandate to protect Uyghur refugees,” Fortify Rights director John Quinley said. “UNHCR leadership does not seem to be proactively trying to find solutions for the Uyghur refugees who are spending years in detention.”
The saga began in 2014 when 350 people were arrested on the border of Malaysia; within a year, roughly half were released to Turkey, while 109 people — mostly men — were deported to China. The status of those deported is unknown. Those remaining have been kept in a detention center, allegedly in life-threatening conditions; some are known to have escaped, while five people, including two children, have died.
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A letter from the UN made a number of accusations against the Thai government, alleging the five deaths were due to “prolonged detention, inhumane conditions in which they were held, and inadequate medical care.” Yet the newly found documents allege that the UN has denied Thailand aid, with a 2019 document claiming that “there have been increased attempts by [the Thai government] to seek that UNHCR find a solution to the issue.”
Some documents claimed that UNHCR is refusing to take action out of fear of offending China. “The [country office] view is that this is so that Thailand may use UNHCR as a shield to deflect the ire of China,” one document says, with another warning of the “risk of negative repercussions on UNHCR’s operation in China” and of “funding/support to UNHCR.” Two more Uyghurs have since died since the time these documents were written.
Yet a UNHCR document issued the same accusation against Thailand. “China does not miss the opportunity to raise this matter as a standard talking point, to which Thailand does not have a response,” the document said. “The impasse is likely because Thailand does not want to confront China on the one hand and the rest of the international community on the other.”
As many as three million Uyghurs are believed to be held in concentration camps in China, where, in addition to torture and forced labor, birth control, sterilization, and abortion, they have been subjected to food deprivation, overcrowding, solitary confinement, rape, forced separation of children from their parents, destruction of cultural and religious heritage, and forced organ harvesting.
“One of the shocking aspects of these memos is that Thailand was apparently pressing UNHCR to get more involved, and UNHCR balked because they feared Beijing would get angry and reduce cooperation or donations to the agency,” Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director for Human Rights Watch, told The New Humanitarian. “UNHCR must refocus on its mandate to protect refugees, and arguably no one in Thailand is more in need of that protection than these Uyghurs.”
