No immediate threat of deportation, state authorities, but rights organizations are concerned
According to human rights activists, 43 members of a minority Asian hill community group have been imprisoned in Bangkok for entering Thailand improperly.
The family of inmate activist Y Quynh Bdap, who is battling extradition from Thailand to Vietnam where he faces a 10-year prison sentence for violence, has been sentenced on Wednesday. He has denied this claim.
68 asylum applicants were detained on Sunday during a police raid on a funeral services in a Nonthaburi group house, including the 43 Montagnards. The company had been organised by Y Quynh Bdap’s woman for her family, who died just in Vietnam.
According to the immigrant help organization Boat People SOS, the majority of those detained were taken into immigration authorities.
Eventually, Thai authorities later confirmed that more than 40 persons had been detained for unlawful entry but that they did not face the threat of deportation right away.
” They were tried for illegal entry and fined 4, 000 baht each. They did not have the money so they were jailed for eight weeks instead”, Pol Col Ronapat Tubtimtong, chief of police in Bang Yai area, told Radio Free Asia on Wednesday.
” They were never workers, they had immigrant cards. They will be incarcerated at the Suan Phlu detention facility after serving their conditions. Generally, NGOs would find bail for them. They will not encounter immediate imprisonment”.
Some of the 68 immediately detained were lawfully able to remain in Thailand and were released, according to Pol Col Ronapat.
All of those detained are Montagnards, people of hills nations from the Central Highlands of Vietnam. The majority of them are Christians who have long been hostile toward the socialist state.
Bdap, a part of the Ede community, fled with his family to Thailand in 2018, complaining of spiritual oppression in Vietnam.
He was granted refugee status by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees ( UNHCR ), but he was detained in Bangkok in June of last year as a result of a request from Vietnam for extradition. In pending a review of the demand from Hanoi, he was immediately sentenced to six months in jail for entering illegally.
Montagnards Stand For Justice ( MSFJ), which the Hanoi government has designated as a terrorist organization, was founded by Bdap. It claims that the organization was a part of a Dak Lak county attack on two public buildings in June 2023 that resulted in nine fatalities.
Bdap and the team have denied the claim. If extradited to Vietnam, he faces a 10-year prison word for “terrorism”, handed down in proceedings by the Dak Lak People’s Court in January 2024.
According to rights activists, there is a great chance that Bdap may become tortured if he is returned to Vietnam.
In September 2024, the Criminal Court in Bangkok ruled in favour of Bdap’s abduction. His attorney, Nadthasiri Bergman, filed an appeal on Feb 14 but said she has never heard anything from the jury since then.
” The abduction involves considering Thailand’s new rules — the Prevention and Suppression of Torture and Enforced Disappearance Act, 2022″, she said, adding that there is no date for the judge’s decision.
During Vietnam’s decades-long conflict, Montagnards favored the US-backed South, and some want more independence while others advocate regional democracy.
US-based Boat People SOS was referred to as a “terrorist” earlier this month by Vietnamese authorities because it supposedly funded MSFJ. Additionally, they charged the charitable organization with looking for a way to stop Y Quynh Bdap from being deported to Thailand.
According to its site, Virginia-based BPSOS, which helped rescue more than 25, 000 Asian ship people in the 1980s, works to assist victims of human rights violations and Asian asylum seekers in neighboring countries.