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Thai authorities
reportedly pushed refugees back to Myanmar on several occasions in 2022,
including in January and September 2022.
Fortify Rights spoke with 13 Myanmar refugees, including the three
ethnic-Karen teachers featured in the film, a Thai resident living on the
Thailand-Myanmar border, and eight humanitarian workers, U.N. officials,
and others supporting displaced communities on the Thailand-Myanmar border.
“Many [Thai] military personnel and police came,” said “Naw Htoo Eh Say,” a
31-year-old ethnic-Karen teacher featured in the film, describing how Thai
authorities apprehended her and approximately 100 of her students in
January 2022 in Phrop Phra District, Thailand, near the Myanmar border.
“All of them were carrying guns. There were over 20 [military and police] .
. . They said, ‘You are all illegal. So, you have to go back [to
Myanmar].’”
“Naw Wah Eh,” 52, another ethnic-Karen teacher featured in the film,
describing the same incident said: “[Thai authorities] came and ordered
everyone to line up. They told the children not to run. Woken up in the
middle of the night, some of the children cried and urinated on
themselves.”
The teachers shared how the Thai authorities herded the group onto trucks
and forced them across the border to Myanmar the following day.
Forty-year-old “Naw Phaw Wah,” who was also a teacher with the group, told
Fortify Rights:
There were
different groups of military and police stationed by the road, like it was
planned beforehand. They were all carrying guns and watching us . . . They
dropped us at the riverside, and many soldiers surrounded us with guns.
“Go!” They said to us. We couldn’t do anything. All of us went back [to
Karen State, Myanmar].
This incident is
consistent with other violations documented by Fortify Rights in 2022. For
example, on October 12, 2022, Fortify Rights submitted to the NHRCT
information about forced returns, arbitrary arrests and detention, and the
extortion of Myanmar refugees from Thailand. As part of this information,
Fortify Rights included reference to earlier documentation, in May 2022,
exposing how Thai soldiers destroyed a makeshift
cross-border footbridge used by refugees fleeing Myanmar as well
as testimony evidencing the arbitrary arrest, detention,
and extortion of Myanmar refugees by Thai authorities.
On December 27, 2022, the NHRCT responded in a letter to Fortify Rights
saying that it “has accepted to review your complaint and has instructed
its affiliated agencies to work on the case.” Specifically, the NHRCT
instructed the Human Rights Protection Bureau 2 to use information provided
by Fortify Rights “for the preparation of the [sic] human rights
violation investigation report regarding the rights of migrants” and for
the International Human Rights Affairs Bureau “to further furnish its
opinion to the cabinet when Thailand decides to become a party to any
[human rights] treaty.”
While the NHRCT letter to Fortify Rights was private, the information
contained in the letter is not confidential, said Fortify Rights.
The NHRCT also instructed the Legal Affairs Bureau to use Fortify Rights’s
information “to develop recommendations” for the implementation of the National Screening Mechanism
(NSM).
Although the Thai Cabinet approved in December 2019 the creation of the
NSM—a process to facilitate the identification and potential protection of
refugees in Thailand—it has yet to be implemented. As recently as December
15, 2022, Fortify Rights highlighted concerns
with the proposed NSM in an open letter to
Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha after the Thai Cabinet approved in
principle provisions that would potentially exclude migrant workers and
others from accessing due protection in Thailand.
“We expect Thai authorities to cooperate fully with the
human rights commission’s investigation,” said Amy Smith. “Ongoing
atrocities in Myanmar are creating new refugee flows, and Thailand is
well-placed to be part of a regional solution to mitigate the crisis in
Myanmar. Instead, Thailand is exacerbating protection concerns for
displaced communities fleeing the Myanmar junta while attempting to
legitimize the junta.”
Since the February
1, 2021 coup d’état in Myanmar, Fortify Rights has documented
a variety of international crimes committed by the Myanmar junta, including
crimes against humanity and
war crimes. On
January 24, 2022, Fortify Rights and 16 individual complainants from
Myanmar announced the filing of a criminal complaint
with the Federal Public Prosecutor General of Germany under the principle
of universal jurisdiction against senior Myanmar military generals and
others for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.
Speaking about how atrocities by the Myanmar military forced the three
teachers and their students to flee to Thailand, “Naw Htoo Eh Say,” said:
Some of my
students went home to their villages during the school holidays. When they
returned, their homes were gone. No roofs, no walls, no floors . . . They
were destroyed, so the students and their families needed to leave. I was
worried an airstrike would hit [our village]. We are near the gunfighting area
and can hear everything.
Her colleague “Naw
Paw Wah” agreed, saying: “I miss our village. I grew up there. But it’s
dangerous. There is fighting there. Thailand is our only safe option.”
Although Thailand is not a state party to the 1951 Refugee Convention or
its 1967 protocol, the Convention provides authoritative guidance on
refugee protection under international law. Moreover, the principle of non-refoulement,
which prohibits the forced return of a person to a country where they may face
torture or other forms of ill-treatment, is accepted as binding on all
states under international customary law. Section 13 of Thailand’s recently
enacted Prevention and Suppression of Torture and Enforced Disappearance
Act further affirmed Thailand’s obligation under
domestic law to prevent the forced return of “a person to
another country where there are substantial grounds for believing that the
person would be in danger of torture, cruel, inhuman, or degrading
treatment, or enforced disappearance.”
Thailand is also a signatory to the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
Article 3 of the CRC states that, “In all actions concerning children . . .
the best interests of the child shall be a primary consideration.” This
provision is echoed in Section 22 of Thailand’s Child Protection Act.
“Thailand has made laws, policies, and commitments to
protect refugees, but these commitments are meaningless without action,” said Amy Smith. “It is time
for Thailand to translate its commitments on paper into genuine protections
for refugees.”
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