China, India, Malaysia, Thailand and Bangladesh have been identified as among the worst violators of refugees’ rights in a global survey released ahead of World Refugee Day, which fell yesterday.
They joined Iraq, Kenya, Russia, Sudan and Europe as the 10 worst places for refugees last year, according to this year’s World Refugee Survey, released in Washington on Thursday.
The annual study, conducted by the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI), a non-governmental group, also showed the total number of refugees growing to 14 million at the end of last year, the largest it has been since 2001.
Driving the growth again were Iraqi refugees, with more than 550,000 fleeing their country. In all, more than 2 million refugees from the insurgency-wracked nation are awaiting an end to violence in their homeland.
The list of worst places for refugees was based on violators turning refugees away to face further persecution, violence and possibly death, or letting them enter a country and subjecting them to deprivation and stultifying limbo, USCRI said.
“We’ve tried to call attention to these countries because they have been particularly egregious in their treatment of refugees,” USCRI president Lavinia Limon said.
“Some of them have forced refugees back into dangerous situations, some of them have warehoused refugees in camps for decades and some of them have done their best to make sure refugees never enter their territory. Some of them have done all of the above,” she said.
REFUGEE PROTECTION
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has made refugee protection the theme of this year’s World Refugee Day.
In a report card that graded countries from A to F and formed the basis for the USCRI worst violators’ list, China, Malaysia and Thailand received an F grade following a study on forcibly returning refugees to their homes and physical protection of refugees.
Some of the North Korean refugees repatriated by China have reportedly been executed.
Malaysia forced refugees from Myanmar to Thailand, where “some of them were sold into slavery — men to fishing boats and women to brothels,” said Merrill Smith, USCRI director of international planning and analysis.
Thailand also forced refugees to return to Myanmar and Laos, he said.
Malaysia and Thailand also got an F grade together with Bangladesh and China in a study on treatment of refugees who are detained and provided access to courts.
In the category where freedom of movement of refugees was gauged, Thailand and Bangladesh received the worst grade.
“Thailand confined about 140,000 refugees in special refugee camps where they are not allowed to leave — mostly those from Myanmar and Laos,” Smith said.
RIGHT TO LIVELIHOOD
Malaysia, Bangladesh and Nepal also received the worst grade in a study on whether governments allowed refugees to earn a livelihood.
One of the reasons that India was listed as among the worst places for refugees was because of its “radically discriminatory treatment of refugees,” Smith said.
“They treat refugees depending on their nationality — at the better end of the spectrum would be the Tibetan refugees, they are treated the best. Sri Lankans not so well but worst of all would be the Chin ethnic group from Myanmar,” he said.
Smith pointed out that treating refugees well did not mean that they would remain permanently in their host countries, citing Malaysia as an example.
He said that Malaysia in 2005 issued documents to refugees from neighboring Indonesia’s Aceh Province allowing them to work and move about freely following the tsunami that devastated the province.
Of the 32,000 Acehnese who received those documents, only 6,000 remained in Malaysia as of this year while the others returned home, Smith said.
“The interesting part about that is that treating refugees well does not cause them to stay,” he said.
The West was also criticized in the report, including the US and the EU, which received grades of F and D, respectively, for their poor physical protection of refugees including the forced repatriation of some asylum-seekers.
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the