Dega Central Highlands Organization Dega Central Highlands Organization
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Asylum today: Cambodia, Thailand, and the reach of the state

Exile Explainer 6 views 5 min read Back

The Dega who leave the highlands are no longer safe once they are out of them. On 28 November 2025 Thailand handed a UNHCR-recognised refugee back to Vietnam, to serve ten years imposed at a trial he was not present at. That single act describes the present situation better than any summary could.

A family crossing a river on foot
Leaving the highlands is no longer the end of the risk. Illustration.

The route out, and how it closed

After February 2001 highlanders crossed into Cambodia in numbers, including people who had never been near a demonstration. UNHCR opened sites in the border provinces of Mondulkiri and Ratanakiri, and a tripartite arrangement between Vietnam, Cambodia and UNHCR was meant to govern what happened to those who arrived.

It did not hold. In 2002 Cambodia closed the border-province sites and restricted UNHCR protection officers to Phnom Penh. Hundreds were returned to Vietnam over the following years. After Easter 2004 the Cambodian border police were instructed to turn back anyone crossing without documents. Human Rights Watch documented Montagnards arrested on the Vietnamese side while attempting to flee — at least 65 between 2001 and 2011 — and returnees imprisoned under Penal Code article 91, "fleeing abroad to oppose the People's Administration".

The practical effect is that the nearest country stopped being a place of asylum and became a place a person could be picked up in and handed back from.

Bangkok

Those who could went further. Thailand is not a party to the 1951 Refugee Convention, but it is bound by the Convention against Torture, by its own 2022 anti-torture and enforced disappearance act, and by the customary rule of non-refoulement — that no state may return a person to a country where they face a real risk of persecution or torture. A UNHCR refugee card carries no status under Thai law: its holder is still, to an immigration officer, a person present without permission.

On a Sunday in late February 2025, Thai police raided a community hall in Nonthaburi province north of Bangkok during a funeral service and detained 68 Montagnards on charges of illegal entry and residence. 43 of the 68 held UNHCR refugee cards. Twenty-seven were members of Montagnards Stand for Justice. Each was fined 4,000 baht — about 118 US dollars — and those who could not pay were jailed for eight days and then moved to the Suan Plu immigration detention centre, to wait on bail raised by NGOs.

A mourning service, a police cordon, and a fine equal to weeks of work. That is what asylum in the region now looks like in practice.

Y Quynh Bđăp

Y Quynh Bđăp left Vietnam for Thailand in 2018 after being pursued for attending a 2016 conference on religious freedom. UNHCR recognised him as a refugee. In Thailand he founded Montagnards Stand for Justice, which documents religious persecution and rights violations in the Central Highlands.

  • June 2023 — Mass arrests across Dak Lak after the attacks at Cu Kuin (see Cu Kuin, 2023).
  • January 2024 — Convicted in absentia at a mobile court trial of around a hundred defendants; sentenced to ten years.
  • March 2024 — Vietnam designates Montagnards Stand for Justice a terrorist organisation. No evidence for the designation has been produced.
  • June 2024 — Arrested by Thai police on Vietnam's extradition request.
  • July 2024 — UN special procedures state that they are alarmed at the possible extradition.
  • October 2024 — A Thai court grants the extradition request.
  • November 2025 — The Court of Appeal upholds it.
  • 28 November 2025 — Y Quynh Bđăp is returned to Vietnam. He was 33.
  • December 2025 — UN experts say they are alarmed by the extradition; Human Rights Watch states that Thailand has blatantly violated its own anti-torture law.

What the sequence establishes

Convicted without being present, of terrorism, on evidence that UN experts say includes material obtained under torture, for running an organisation whose activity is publishing what happens in the highlands — and then delivered by a third country that is bound not to deliver him. The case is not primarily about one man. It is the proof that the designation of a documentation group as terrorist is an export product: once the label exists, it does the work of an extradition treaty in countries that would not otherwise cooperate.

Transnational repression, in plain terms

What links Phnom Penh in 2003 to Nonthaburi in 2025 is that leaving the country stopped being an escape. The instruments are ordinary ones — bilateral agreements, immigration law, terrorism designations, extradition requests — and each is individually defensible, which is what makes the pattern hard to name. The effect is that a Dega family with a UNHCR card in Bangkok is one raid away from a detention centre and one court ruling away from a Vietnamese prison.

The obligations, on paper, are not in doubt. What Vietnam has signed sets out Vietnam's; Thailand and Cambodia have their own under the Convention against Torture, which binds them whether or not they have signed the Refugee Convention. Non-refoulement is not conditional on a person's status being convenient.

If this is your situation

  • Read reporting safely before contacting anybody about your case, including us.
  • Keep your UNHCR documents, and copies of them somewhere other than where you sleep.
  • If a family member has been detained, what to record in the first hours is written for exactly that.
  • We are not lawyers and this page is not legal advice. What we can do is record what happened, in a form that a lawyer or a UN body can use.

Sources

Compiled September 2026 and the page in this library most likely to be out of date. If you know the current position of anyone named here, or of the 68 detained in February 2025, tell us — safely.

asylumrefugeesthailandcambodiaunhcrnon-refoulementy quynh bdaptransnational repression2025bangkok
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