In a recent report to the ASEAN Inter-Governmental Commission on Human Rights, a group of NGOs highlight a growing pattern of human rights violations across Southeast Asia involving trafficking rackets that are fuelled by scam online employment schemes. The report echoes recent information that the Global Detention Project has received from sources in Cambodia about […]
Thailand
Asylum Seeker’s Death Highlights Brutal Impact of Thailand’s Detention Policies
The recent death of a Uyghur asylum seeker detained in the Bangkok Immigration Detention Centre (Suan Phlu) has prompted renewed calls for Thailand to release a group of 49 ethnic Uyghurs who have now been detained in the country for nine years. Aziz Abdullah, 49, died on 11 February after he collapsed in a cell […]

Thailand Immigration Detention Data Profile (2020)
Thailand Detention Data (2020) The latest detention-related data from Thailand, including immigration and detention-related statistics, domestic laws and policies, international law, and institutional indicators. View the Thailand Detention Data Profile Related Reading: Thailand: Country Page Submission to the Human Rights Committee: Thailand Report: Immigration Detention in Thailand Thailand: COVID-19 Updates […]

Kidnapped, Trafficked, Detained? The Implications of Non-state Actor Involvement in Immigration Detention
This article critically assesses a range of new non-state actors who have become involved in the deprivation of liberty of migrants and asylum seekers, describes the various forces that appear to be driving their engagement, and makes a series of recommendations concerning the role of non-state actors and detention in global efforts to manage international migration. […]

Submission to the Human Rights Committee: Thailand
Global Detention Project Submission to the UN Human Rights Committee (CCPR) 117th Session (20 June – 15 July 2016) Country Report Task Force for the adoption of the list of issues – Thailand Geneva, 7 April 2016 The Global Detention Project (GDP) welcomes the opportunity to provide information for the Committee Country Report Task […]

Immigration Detention in Thailand
Thailand hosts more than four million migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees. Officials have broad discretionary powers to place non-citizens in detention and there is no detention time limit. Severe overcrowding is endemic at detention facilities and conditions are reportedly abysmal, including for the thousands of foreign children who are detained annually. […]

There and Back Again: On the Diffusion of Immigration Detention
From Mexico to the Bahamas, Mauritania to Lebanon, Turkey to Saudi Arabia, South Africa to Indonesia, Malaysia to Thailand, immigration-related detention has become an established policy apparatus that counts on dedicated facilities and burgeoning institutional bureaucracies. Until relatively recently, however, detention appears to have been largely an ad hoc tool, employed mainly by wealthy states in exigent circumstances. This paper uses concepts from diffusion theory to detail the history of key policy events in several important immigration destination countries that led to the spreading of detention practices during the last 30 years and assesses some of the motives that appear to have encouraged this phenomenon. […]
