The Stateless Rohingya Blog

By   UN News December 26, 2013 The United Nations human rights office today urged the Government of Thailand to drop criminal defamation charges against two journalists who wrote about the alleged involvement of the Thai Navy with human trafficking.  “Criminal prosecution for defamation has a chilling effect on freedom of the press,”  said  Ravina Shamdasani, the spokesperson for the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights ( OHCHR ). “International standards are clear that imprisonment is never an appropriate penalty for defamation.”  Editor Alan Morison and reporter Chutima Sidasathian, who write for Phuketwan, a small English-language newspaper based on one of the Thai islands, cited a Reuters investigative report alleging the involvement of Thai naval security forces in smuggling Rohingya asylum-seekers fleeing Myanmar, where ethnic Rakhine Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims have been clashing since last year.  Mr. Morison and...

Children who arrived on a Rohingya boat off Phuket on January 1 Photo by phuketwan.com/file For years, thousands of ethnic Rohingya from Myanmar's Arakan State have set sail to flee persecution by the Myanmar (Burmese) government.  The situation significantly worsened following sectarian violence in Arakan State in June 2012 between Muslim Rohingya and Buddhist Arakanese, which displaced tens of thousands of Rohingya from their homes.  In October 2012, Arakanese political and religious leaders and state security forces committed crimes against humanity in a campaign of ''ethnic cleansing'' against the Rohingya.  During the so-called ''sailing season'' between October 2012 and March 2013, more than 35,000 Rohingya are believed to have fled the country.  International pressure on Thailand to provide temporary protection to Rohingya arriving on its shores resulted in the current detention policy. Since January, more than 1800 Rohingya...

The Thai government should quickly decide on temporary shelters for displaced Rohingya people until practical longer-term solutions are reached, says a member of the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC). Dr Niran Pitakwatchara said he was concerned that the Rohingya refugees were being deprived of basic rights while under temporary care in Thailand. After drifting at the sea and being towed into various islands in southern Thailand since early this year, the migrants have been kept in scattered shelters and detention centres nationwide. Now it is time for the government to decide what to do next, said Dr Niran. Thousands of Rohingya Muslims have fled persecution in Myanmar over the past year and many have ended up in Thailand. They faced poor temporary shelter, exploitation by trafficking gangs, and extortion from smuggling gangs during their stay in Thailand, Dr Niran said at a seminar on the refugee problem. He suggested that something could still be done despite th...

GENEVA  (Reuters) - The head of U.N. refugee agency UNHCR said on Friday he hopes common sense will prevail in Australia's election-season debate about how the country treats asylum seekers. "We are of course very much interested, not in the election itself, but in the debate about asylum policy in Australia," said U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres. Opinion polls predict the government of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's Labor Party will be unseated by the conservative coalition led by Tony Abbot when Australians vote on September 7. In a pitch to voters concerned about immigration, Abbott promised last week to revive tough laws barring thousands of asylum seekers already in Australia from settling there permanently. "The debate about these questions, not only in Australia but in many other parts of the world, is unfortunately not always based only on realities. It's based on perceptions, on prejudice, on other aspects," Guterr...

GENEVA -- It's shaping up to be a lost generation: The number of child refugees fleeing Syria's violence has now topped the 1 million mark. The grim milestone announced Friday by U.N. officials means as many Syrian children have been uprooted from their homes or families as the number of children who live in Wales, or in Boston and Los Angeles combined, said Antonio Guterres, the head of the Office for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. "Can you imagine Wales without children? Can you imagine Boston and Los Angeles without children?" Guterres told reporters in Geneva. Roughly half of all the nearly 2 million registered refugees from Syria are children and 740,000 of those are under the age of 11, according to the U.N. refugee and children's agencies. Guterres said the horrors of war experienced by these children puts them in grave danger of becoming a "lost generation." With emotion he recounted some of his personal visits with Syrian ...

UN News Villawood Immigration Detention Centre outside Sydney, Australia. Photo: IRIN  Australia’s arbitrary and indefinite detention of 46 refugees amounts to “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment” the United Nations Human Rights Committee has  said , calling for their immediate release. The refugees, who have been held in detention for at least two and half years, had been recognized as asylum-seekers who could not return to their homes. However, the Australian Government refused to grant them visas on the grounds that they posed a security risk. The 46 refugees – 42 Tamils from Sri Lanka, three Rohingya from Myanmar and a Kuwaiti –were not told the reasons of why they were considered a security risk, and so could not mount a legal challenge to their indefinite detention. “The combination of the arbitrary character of (their) detention, its protracted and/or indefinite duration, the refusal to provide information and procedural rights to (them) and the difficu...

The navy intercepts a boat full of asylum seekers: Australia has been found guilty of violating the human rights of 46 refugees.  Photo: Sharon Tisdale Australia has been found guilty of almost 150 violations of international law over the indefinite detention of 46 refugees in one of the most damning assessments of human rights in this country by a United Nations committee. The federal government has been ordered to release the refugees, who have been in detention for more than four years, "under individually appropriate conditions" and to provide them with rehabilitation and compensation. Consistent with Australia's treaty obligations, the government has been given 180 days to assure the committee that it has acted on the recommendations and taken steps to prevent "similar violations in future". The UN's Human Rights Committee concluded that the continued detention of the refugees, most of them Sri Lankan Tamils, is "cumulati...