BANGKOK (AP) — A leading international human rights group urged the Thai government Thursday to stop forcing political dissidents who have fled to Thailand for safety to return to authoritarian homelands where they could face torture, persecution or death.
In a new report, Human Rights Watch says Thai authorities have repeatedly violated international law by deporting the dissidents. Many of them were registered as refugees with the United Nations and were awaiting resettlement in third countries.
The report, titled ‘We Thought We Were Safe’, analyzed 25 cases that occurred in Thailand between 2014 and 2023.
In many cases this involved the forced repatriation of Cambodians, probably involving Cambodian security personnel. But the group also listed cases in which dissidents from Vietnam, Laos and China were “tracked down and kidnapped” or “forcibly disappeared or murdered.”
The report said that in exchange for tracking down and returning the dissidents, the Thai government received cooperation from Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam to spy on Thai dissidents who had fled their own homelands to escape political repression.
Human Rights Watch called this a quid pro quo form of transnational repression “in which foreign dissidents are effectively exchanged for critics of the Thai government living abroad.”
The group said such arrangements, informally known as “swap marts”, became more common after the Thai military staged a coup in 2024 that ousted an elected government. The military and army-backed rule lasted ten years, until an elected civilian government led by a prime minister was established. Srettha Thavisin took office last year.
“The Srettha government should launch an investigation into these allegations of harassment, surveillance and forced returns of asylum seekers and refugees in Thailand. It should investigate the disappearance of Thai anti-junta activists in other Southeast Asian countries,” Elaine Pearson, director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia division, told the Associated Press.
“I think there is an opportunity to end this practice and that the Srettha government shows that it is different from the previous military-led government,” she added.
She noted that the Thai government is currently seeking a seat on the UN Human Rights Council “and that comes with responsibilities to protect human rights.”
The report cites nine cases of Thai activists in Laos and Cambodia who have disappeared or been murdered under mysterious circumstances.
The mutilated bodies of two missing activists were found floating in the Mekong River in late 2018. In 2020, a young Thai activist, Wanchalearm Satsaksit, was grabbed off the streets of the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh and never heard from again.
Thai authorities have repeatedly denied any link to such events.
Dr. Francesca Lessa, associate professor of International Relations at University College London, said there were some parallels with the way autocratic governments in Latin America struck deals in the late 1970s and 1980s to work together to eliminate their political opponents on each other’s soil .
“Whether they follow right-wing or left-wing ideologies, these autocratic governments view opposition and dissent as a threat to their continued existence in power and thus must be eliminated by whatever means necessary,” Lessa told the AP.
