By Panu Wongcha-um and Panarat Thepgumpanat
BANGKOK (Reuters) – International standards and human rights principles must be followed, Thailand’s prime minister said on Thursday, in response to concerns aired by activists that 48 Uyghurs held for more than a decade had been secretly deported to China.
Last month United Nations human rights experts had urged Thailand not to send the 48 Uyghurs back to China, warning they were at risk of torture, ill-treatment and “irreparable harm” if returned.
On Thursday, China’s official Xinhua news agency said Thailand, acting in line with both nations’ laws, had repatriated 40 Chinese who had entered the Southeast Asian nation illegally, but did not specify if they were Uyghurs.
When asked about the status of the 48 Uyghurs, Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra did not confirm an extradition had taken place in remarks delivered before the Xinhua report, saying she had yet to discuss the issue with officials.
“This sort of issue, for any country, one has to follow the law, international process and human rights,” she told reporters, without elaborating.
Thailand’s immigration police, China’s foreign ministry and its embassy in Bangkok did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Thursday.
Early on Thursday, several trucks with windows covered in black tape were seen leaving the Bangkok immigration centre where the 48 Uyghurs had been held, images accompanying domestic media reports showed.
A few hours later, at 4.48 a.m., an unscheduled China Southern Airlines flight left the Don Mueang airport in the Thai capital to land six hours later in Kashgar in China’s Xinjiang region, tracker Flightradar24 showed.
Rights groups accuse Beijing of widespread abuses of Uyghurs, a mainly Muslim ethnic minority that numbers around 10 million in the western region of Xinjiang. Beijing denies any abuses.
The Cross Cultural Foundation, a Thai human rights group, said it would petition a court on Thursday for an immediate inquiry to compel officials to testify on the status of the Uyghurs and present the detainees.
SECURITY RISK
In Thursday’s report, Xinhua said the 40 repatriated Chinese had been “bewitched by criminal organisations” and were stranded in Thailand.
It said their families had repeatedly asked the Chinese government to assist in their return.
The 48 Uyghurs held in Thailand were part of a group of 300 who fled China and were arrested in 2014. Some were sent back to China and others to Turkey, with the rest kept in Thai custody.
Thailand’s government has recently said there was no immediate plan to deport them, although it had not ruled out their return.
The political leadership wants to deport the Uyghurs to China, despite warnings from its agencies that the move posed a security risk and would breach human rights principles, said a Thai security official, who sought anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.
Some diplomats and security analysts believe Thailand’s deportation of 100 Uyghurs to China in July 2015 led to the bombing a month later of a busy Bangkok shrine that killed 20 people in the worst attack of its kind on Thai soil.
Thailand was widely condemned for the deportation of the 100 Uyghurs, amid international concern that they could be tortured. Their fate is unknown.
Thai authorities at the time concluded the shrine attack was linked to their crackdown on a human trafficking ring, without specifically linking the group to the Uyghurs.
Two ethnic Uyghur men were arrested, and charged with murder and illegal possession of explosives and their trial is proceeding, despite repeated delays.
(Reporting by Panu Wongcha-um and Panarat Thepgumpanat; Additional reporting by Chayut Setboonsarng in Bangkok, Laurie Chen in Beijing and Farah Master in Hong Kong; Editing by Martin Petty and Clarence Fernandez)
