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View all search resultsUN blasts Thailand for deporting third Cambodian refugee
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T
he United Nations refugee agency has condemned Thailand for deporting a third Cambodian refugee in two weeks, after a former female politician was sent back to a Phnom Penh jail.
Thavry Lanh — who represented the now dissolved Cambodian opposition party at district government level and was a vocal critic of Prime Minister Hun Sen's government — fled to Thailand more than four years ago.
Thai immigration officers arrested her on Friday in an eastern border town and she was sent to Cambodia the next day.
Gillian Triggs, a senior official with the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), was quoted by AFP as saying that the move contravened the principle of nonrefoulement, under which countries are banned from sending people back to places where their lives or freedom are in danger.
Thavry Lanh's deportation came 10 days after two other Cambodian UNHCR-registered refugees were sent across the border, the agency said in a statement issued on Monday.
The UNHCR tried to intervene in all three cases but the Thai government went ahead with the deportations.
"We are extremely alarmed by this trend of forcibly returning refugees to Cambodia, where they face a serious risk of persecution," Triggs said in the statement, adding that the agency was worried about the fate of other UNHCR-registered refugees in Thailand.
