Young asylum seekers’ pain

These days rights groups are lobbying hard for the swift release of 35 asylum seekers from Pakistan and Somalia. Their concerns are hardly out of place since more than one-third of these detained asylum seekers are children who had been picked up by Thai authorities in a series of raids carried out between October 21 and October 31. Authorities in Pakistan and Somalia — among those countries whose nationals seem to be in a hurry to escape either persecution or unemployment at home and fall prey to the promises of people smugglers — do not appear to care very much about the fate of these would-be immigrants.

A number of these individuals are already registered with the UN’s refugee agency and possess documents proving their status. Yet the police in Thailand are unwilling to give them a break — all in the hope of extorting money from them. Of course those who are unregistered — and their numbers are probably not insignificant — can and should be classified as illegal overstayers, especially those who are adults, and are liable for punishment. Child and juvenile asylum seekers, however, should be spared the same treatment. Rights watchdog Fortify Rights has censured Thai officials for violating the rights of would-be immigrants. Bangkok obviously sees the issue differently. For instance, it refuses to differentiate between illegal immigrants and refugees. The current rules place asylum seekers at a disadvantage because every now and then they routinely risk arrest and deportation for years and months until the UNHCR can process their application and find a country that will take them in.

Neither the UN refugee centre nor the Thai government have constituted a safe system whereby the 7,000-odd individual refugee cases can be handled without a loss of personal dignity and pride. Resettlement ought to become easier for applicants in view of the suffering that each would-be immigrant goes through.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 7^th, 2017.

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