Thailand has deported some 40 Uyghur asylum seekers to China after detaining them for more than a decade, UN’s refugee agency, UNHCR, said on 27 February.
“This is a clear violation of the principle of non-refoulement and the Royal Thai Government’s obligations under international law,” Ruvendrini Menikdiwela, the agency’s assistant high commissioner for protection, said in a statement.
The deportation represents a major blow to human rights activists who have been calling for the group’s release. A Thai court had agreed on 18 February to consider a petition to free the men and was planning to call Thai immigration officials to testify.
“This is a big, big violation of human rights,” Chalida Tajaroensuk, director of the People’s Empowerment Foundation, told The New Humanitarian.
Chinese state media reported that “40 Chinese nationals involved in illegal immigration” had been repatriated from Thailand in a “joint crackdown on cross-border crime”.
Amid a crackdown on separatist movements, the Chinese government has been accused of widespread abuses against Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities in western China, including mass detention in reeducation camps.
Thailand’s National Security Council did not respond to a request for comment.
Thailand kept dozens of Uyghur men in detention after deporting more than 100 to China in 2015. The men were from a larger group of over 300 who were arrested near the Malaysian border the year before. Both countries were part of an overland route used by Uyghurs seeking to claim asylum in Türkiye. Thailand allowed the women and children in the group to travel to Türkiye in 2015.
Some of the detainees escaped detention in Thailand over the years, and five died in custody, including two children, leaving 48. Of these, 43 were kept in Bangkok’s Suan Phlu immigration detention facility without criminal charges, while five were held separately to serve sentences for an escape attempt.
“As each minute passes, it becomes clearer that the Thai government has finally done the unthinkable by forcing at least 40 Uyghurs asylum seekers back to China to face torture in custody, long prison terms, and likely death.”
It wasn’t immediately clear if all of the 48 detained Uyghurs had been deported, just the 43 at Suan Phlu, or 40 – the figure Chinese media reported without confirming they were Uyghurs.
Local journalists staking out the Suan Phlu facility in the early hours of 27 February saw several trucks with covered windows speed away with a police escort. Flightradar24, a flight tracking website, showed an unscheduled China Southern Airlines flight leaving Bangkok just before 5am, with its destination labelled “unspecified”. Six hours later, it landed in Khashgar, in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.
“The plane almost certainly carries the group of Uyghurs,” Peter Irwin, associate director for research and advocacy at the Uyghur Human Rights Project, posted on X.
“As each minute passes, it becomes clearer that the Thai government has finally done the unthinkable by forcing at least 40 Uyghurs asylum seekers back to China to face torture in custody, long prison terms, and likely death,” Phil Robertson, director of Asia Human Rights and Labour Advocates (AHRLA), said in a statement. “What’s also clear is Thai officials involved in this forced return, using blacked out trucks and a barrage of lying denials, have the blood of these Uyghur men on their hands.”
Questions over UNHCR’s actions
Last year, UN experts documented overcrowded, unsanitary conditions in the Suan Phlu facility, noting that nearly half of the men suffered from serious health conditions. They warned that Thailand’s treatment of the Uyghurs may amount to torture and arbitrary detention.
The 48 men had submitted asylum applications to UNHCR, but most did not receive responses. The agency has long maintained that the Thai government has not granted its staff access to “engage with the caseload for the purpose of facilitating solutions”.
The agency’s approach to the case has drawn criticism from activists. “Nothing prevents UNHCR from declaring these people refugees. I don’t understand why this has not happened,” Sophie Richardson, co-executive director of Chinese Human Rights Defenders, said during a panel event in Bangkok in January.
In 2024, The New Humanitarian revealed that the Thai government asked UNHCR around 2019 to “find a solution to the issue” and may have been willing to provide access to the group, according to internal documents. But agency staff worried that the request was an effort to “use UNHCR as a shield to deflect the ire of China” and decided that “taking pro-active steps before the Thai authorities engage UNHCR officially is not advised”.
In January 2025, The New Humanitarian reported that UNHCR had begun the process of examining two of the Uyghur detainees’ requests for refugee status and issued them certificates known as white papers, designating them as asylum seekers who should be protected from forcible return to a country where they would be persecuted. The agency renewed the certificates for several years before allowing them to expire.
That month, many of the men held in the Suan Phlu facility staged a prolonged hunger strike after immigration authorities appeared to be preparing them for deportation. The 43 men were asked to sign documents indicating their consent to be repatriated to China, but they refused.
“After we clearly refused to sign, the IDC authorities took photos of each of us,” they said in a handwritten statement. “We are now facing the imminent danger of being forcibly returned to China.”
“If he is deported to China, he will most likely be sentenced to prison for life, or receive the death penalty,” the brother of one of the detainees told The New Humanitarian at the time.
For weeks, Thai officials denied there were any plans to deport the group.
The Uyghurs’ detention was categorised as a matter of national security, placing it under the purview of Thailand’s National Security Council, which is headed by Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra. When questioned on the matter by journalists at the Thai parliament on 27 February, the prime minister said she had “not been made aware” whether the Uyghurs were deported. She added that the country must “adhere to laws and human rights”.
Robertson said the deportation “blows apart any pretense” of Thailand’s respect for human rights as a member of the UN Human Rights Council.
“The Thai government should resign its seat on the Council to show responsibility for its outrageous and unacceptable action,” he said.
Edited by Andrew Gully.
