Thailand’s deportation of 126 hill tribe children to Myanmar because they lacked official documents has attracted criticism from academics and NGOs for allegedly breaching the UN’s Convention on the Rights of the Child.
The Bangkok Post and Thai PBS news reported that the seven to 16-year-olds studying at a school in Ang Thong in central Thailand were taken to five shelters in Chiang Rai on Wednesday while they waited to be repatriated.
The children are from an Akha village in the Doi Mae Salong hills separating Thailand and Myanmar in Chiang Rai province. The Akha are an ethnic group who live in small villages in the mountains of Thailand, Myanmar, Laos and Yunnan Province in China. Most of the Akha people in Thailand originally came from Myanmar.
The Bangkok Post said on Friday that 30 children had already been sent home after their parents picked them up and the remaining children are at the Social Development and Human Security Provincial Office in Chiang Rai, waiting to be sent to Myanmar.
The Ang Thong authorities had organized their return, it stated.
Charges had been brought against the school’s director, a teacher and two village chiefs for transporting and sheltering the children.
The move comes after complaints were sent to the authorities that a large group of children had enrolled in a school that had only two teachers, one director and one administrator.
The forced repatriation of the children has drawn criticism from academics and NGOs as a breach of the Convention on the Right of the Child and Child Protection Act, which states all children in Thailand are eligible to receive an education despite their ethnicity, the Post reported.
Assistant Professor Darunee Paisanpanichkul, deputy dean of the Faculty of Law at Chiang Mai University, told the newspaper that deporting the ethnic minority children is inappropriate and unnecessary since it is lawful for children of migrant workers to receive an education in Thailand despite their statelessness.
Weera Yooram, director of the Mirror Foundation and Raisom Learning Center for Ethnic and Immigrant Children, was quoted saying the decision was cruel and deportation would only make the children “give up education”.
Thai PBS reported that Thailand’s National Human Rights Commission will try to stop the children from being repatriated.
