(Bangkok) – A group of 48 Uyghur men who have been held for over a decade in Thai immigration detention face risks of enforced disappearance, long-term imprisonment, torture, and other severe mistreatment if Thailand forcibly sends them to China, Human Rights Watch said today. The Uyghurs appear to be at imminent risk following recent moves by Thai immigration officials, including telling the detainees to complete new paperwork and photographing them, steps that the group believes are in preparation for their forcible transfer.
“Successive Thai governments have kept the Uyghurs in inhumane detention, while under pressure from the Chinese government to send them to China,” said Elaine Pearson, Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “The current administration of Thai Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra can end this abusive cycle by immediately releasing the detained Uyghurs and allowing them to travel to a safe third country.”
In March 2014, Thai police in Songkhla province, near the Malaysia border, arrested about 220 Uyghur men, women, and children, charged them with immigration violations, and soon transferred them to an immigration detention facility in Bangkok. In several separate incidents around the same period, authorities arrested dozens of other Uyghurs and placed them in immigration detention facilities around the country. In July 2015, about 170 of the Uyghur women and children detained in Songkhla were released to Turkey. A week later, however, Thai authorities forcibly transferred over 100 Uyghur men to Chinese authorities, who flew them to China.
The 48 Uyghurs who remain in detention have been held for more than 10 years, in squalid conditions with poor hygiene and inadequate medical care, under constant fear that they might also be transferred to Chinese custody. Five Uyghurs detained since 2014 have died in detention, including a newborn and 3-year-old.
In a letter obtained by media from the 48 detainees dated January 10, 2025, the Uyghur group said: “We could be imprisoned, and we might even lose our lives. We urgently appeal to all international organizations and countries concerned with human rights to intervene immediately to save us from this tragic fate before it is too late.” They are now on a hunger strike.
The Thai government is obligated to respect the international law principle of nonrefoulement, which prohibits countries from returning anyone to a place where they would face a real risk of persecution, torture or other serious ill-treatment, a threat to life, or other comparable serious human rights violations. Refoulement is prohibited by the United Nations Convention against Torture to which Thailand is a party as well as customary international law, and the prohibition is incorporated in Thailand’s 2023 Act on Prevention and Suppression of Torture and Enforced Disappearances.
Uyghurs are Turkic-speaking Muslims, most of whom live in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China’s northwest. The Chinese government has long been hostile to expressions of Uyghur identity. Over the last 10 years, China’s repression of Uyghurs has increased significantly as authorities have intensified a widespread and systematic campaign of human rights abuses against them, amounting to crimes against humanity. The authorities have subjected the population to arbitrary detention, unjust imprisonment, mass surveillance, forced labor, and severe movement restrictions. An estimated half million Uyghurs remain imprisoned as part of the ongoing crackdown, in which the authorities have routinely conflated everyday peaceful conduct, such as prayer or contacting relatives abroad, with terrorism and extremism.
Uyghurs considered to have left China illegally are, if returned, viewed with intense suspicion and subject to detention, interrogation, torture, and other cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment.
In a 2022 report, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights documented these intensifying abuses and concluded that China’s actions may amount to crimes against humanity.
Thailand is not a party to the 1951 Refugee Convention and has no effective national mechanisms to assess asylum claims. Thai immigration authorities have repeatedly refused to allow the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) access to the men, preventing them from exercising their rights to seek recognition of their refugee status. The Thai government’s prolonged detention of the Uyghurs also violates international human rights law prohibitions against arbitrary detention, Human Rights Watch said.
“The Thai government should be helping people fleeing persecution, not jailing them, and certainly should not be violating international law and sending them into harm’s way,” Pearson said. “The Thai authorities should immediately allow the United Nations refugee agency to screen the 48 Uyghurs and ensure their onward travel to a safe third country.”