Item 3: General Debate

Speaker: Claire Denman

Thank you Mr President,

CSW is deeply concerned by situations of refoulement, and subsequent risk of arbitrary detention, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.

CSW condemns the deportation of 40 Uyghur men from Thailand to China on 27 February.

As UN experts warned prior to the deportation,¹ returning these individuals to China would surely consign them to arbitrary detention in one of the so-called ‘political re-education camps’ in which the Chinese Communist Party has detained over one million Uyghurs, Kazakhs and members of other predominantly Muslim ethnic groups since 2017.

We call on the Chinese Communist Party to ensure that these men are not detained or subjected to any form of torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

We also urge the government of Thailand to halt the possible deportation of a remaining eight Uyghurs.

Similarly, we urge Thailand not to deport Vietnamese human rights activist Y Quynh Bdap to Vietnam, where he was ‘convicted of terrorism offences in absentia’ in a trial that did not meet fair trial guarantees, as part of the Vietnamese government’s ongoing targeting of the Montagnard ethnic group and Montagnard rights organisations.

If returned to Vietnam, Bdap is sure to be imprisoned, where he will likely face torture and other forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.

Bdap has been granted refugee status by the UN Refugee Agency in Bangkok, and Thailand has no extradition agreement with Vietnam.

We also remind Prime Minister Pae-ton-tarn Shin-awat that a state does not have an obligation to return a refugee to a country where they face serious threats to their life or freedom, and therefore implore her not to authorise the extradition order.