Cambodia’s Deportation of Uighurs to China Remembered

Four years after the forcible deportation of 20 Uighur asylum seekers from Cambodia to China, an advocacy group has said it remains “deeply concerned” about their fate and has called on China to lift a veil of secrecy surrounding their treatment. In a statement, the World Uyghur Congress (WUC), which is based in Munich, said on Friday that 17 members of the Turkic ethnic group, who had already applied for asylum in Cambodia, “are confirmed to still be in detention [in China], some of whom have been sentenced to between 16 years and life in prison.” … The group of Uighurs, which included a pregnant woman and two children, had come to Cambodia in the wake of violence that erupted between Han Chinese and ethnic Uighurs in Urumqi in China’s northwest in July 2009. But while their applications for asylum were being processed by the U.N. Refugee Agency, they were removed at gunpoint from the house in which they had been staying in Phnom Penh and put on a night-time flight to China on December 19, 2009. In forcibly deporting the Uighurs, Cambodia flouted the 1951 U.N. convention on refugees as well as a separate U.N. protocol on the deportation of refugees. … Cambodia took over refugee status determination from the U.N. in 2009. In 2011, it shuttered the U.N. Refugee Agency’s center in Phnom Penh and 75 Montagnard asylum seekers were resettled abroad or deported to Vietnam, where they claim they are persecuted for their Christian beliefs and demands for indigenous land rights. …

 Lauren Crothers
http://www.cambodiadaily.com/news/cambodias-deportation-of-uighurs-to-china-remembered-49549/