Illustration by Gil Wannalertsiri, Freedom House.
Thai authorities should not forcibly return Uyghur asylum seekers to China.
Freedom House, February 13, 2025
Elise Anderson
Senior Program Officer, Asia Programs
Yana Gorokhovskaia
Research Director, Strategy and Design
In Thailand, 48 Uyghurs, detained for a decade after trying to escape China, are at imminent risk of being returned there. They have begged to be sent to another country and appealed to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) for international protection. Several have reportedly died in detention. With few options remaining, the men resorted to holding a hunger strike for over two weeks in January. A group of UN experts has called on Thai authorities to stop the men from being sent back to China, where they face imprisonment, torture, or worse. Their plight is emblematic of how authoritarian regimes co-opt the immigration systems of other nations to engage in transnational repression, aiming to silence, intimidate, or harm perceived critics across borders.
A forced detour into detention
Uyghurs have fled widespread repression in China for decades, long before a campaign of cultural annihilation and atrocity crimes that caught the world’s attention in 2017. Around 2014, authorities implemented the “Strike Hard Campaign Against Violent Terrorism” and “People’s War on Terror” in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, home to Uyghurs and other ethnic Turkic groups. That prompted large numbers of Uyghurs to travel irregular migration routes through countries in the Mekong region of Southeast Asia in hopes of settling in Turkey. Hundreds have been detained in Thailand.
Thailand does not recognize the status of refugees or asylum seekers and has signed neither the UN Refugee Convention nor the 1967 protocol. The government can detain those it considers illegal migrants for an unlimited amount of time. It also ignores the international prohibition on refoulement, the practice where refugees or asylum seekers are forced to return to a country where they likely face serious human rights violations. Uyghurs are subject to especially harsh restrictions because Thailand’s government has classified their detention as a matter of national security. As such, they are prohibited from communicating with non-Uyghur detainees or contacting anyone else outside their detention facility. And they cannot use the National Screening Mechanism, which is how other migrants access public services in Thailand.
The men now facing deportation were part of a group of nearly 400 people detained in 2014 near the border with Malaysia. While approximately 170 women and children from the group were resettled in Turkey in mid-2015, between 109 and 150 Uyghur men were deported to China without warning soon after, prompting international condemnation. Some of those who were returned presumably received long prison sentences and have not been heard from since.
Some 70 or so men remained in Thailand. In the ensuing years, an estimated 20 have escaped, 5 have been put in prison, and 5 (including 2 young children) have died. Some 43 men have remained in an immigration detention center (IDC), experiencing malnutrition, living in poor conditions, and lacking sufficient medical care. Advocates suspect that the men have remained in the IDC because the government seeks to avoid angering Beijing by releasing them, and is also hoping to sidestep international ire for deporting them.
Early in January 2025, the 43 men in the IDC were reportedly asked to sign voluntary return papers, which prompted their 17-day hunger strike—their last desperate effort to avoid being returned to China. Advocates working on the case fear that the five imprisoned Uyghurs are also in danger.
Co-opting immigration controls to target the vulnerable
China is the world’s leading perpetrator of transnational repression, responsible for 22 percent of all of the incidents recorded by Freedom House between 2014 and 2024. Beijing’s campaign is remarkable for both its reach and its scope; human rights defenders, former insiders, students, journalists, and ethnic and religious groups are among its targets. Uyghurs worldwide face daunting threats: surveillance, intimidation, harassment, assault, coercion of family members, mobility controls, detention, Interpol abuse, and unlawful deportation. Uyghurs do not have to engage in activism to be targeted—their identity is enough to subject them to repression.
Although extraterritorial assassinations, like the shooting of a Cambodian opposition politician in Bangkok last month, tend to attract media headlines, transnational repression is often more indirect. Rather than sending assassins to target exiles, more often governments use the agencies of other countries to have individuals extradited or unlawfully deported. This practice extends beyond China, with the governments of Belarus, Egypt, Russia, Sudan, Turkmenistan, and others tapping into immigration systems in Middle Eastern, Asian, European, and North American nations.
Thailand’s government has already deported a large group of Uyghurs. If it deports the 48 men at risk now, it will bolster Beijing’s campaign of repression. But by saving these men, Bangkok, which was recently elected to the UN Human Rights Council, would avoid the costly international criticism it faced a decade ago and demonstrate a practical commitment to human rights.
Standing up for human rights and national sovereignty
There is time to prevent these men from being returned to China. Instead of restricting access, Thai authorities should allow the UNHCR to interact with the detained men, who deserve a speedier end to their long ordeal. The authorities, with the help of international partners, could allow the men to resettle in a third country that will accept them, and the UNHCR can do its utmost to help these men while resisting whatever pressure Beijing may place on it for fulfilling its vital mandate. By protecting these men’s rights and ending their long period of detention, Bangkok would also be sending a strong signal about its ability to act independently of Beijing’s influence.
Transnational repression threatens the security of host countries, not just individuals. Through tactics meant to silence dissent, perpetrators are trying to unilaterally impose their legal systems beyond their borders. In the process, they violate the sovereignty of countries where exiled activists or persecuted religious minorities travel to or settle in. It is in those countries’ interests to resist and rebuff the tools of transnational repression—including the misuse of immigration controls and bad-faith allegations of terrorism—that harm some of the world’s most vulnerable people.
