Thailand’s screening mechanism: what it offers a Dega refugee

Thailand has no refugee law. It has one procedure, written in 2019 and switched on in September 2023, that can give a person who cannot go home a Thai status called “Protected Person.” In its first thirty months it produced seven of them, out of an urban caseload of more than five thousand five hundred. All seven were granted in the first thirteen months; in the eighteen months after October 2024 the committee granted the status to nobody. And to apply at all, a person must first have been arrested and put into deportation proceedings. The organization that works inside the process put it in one sentence: the system designed to prevent arbitrary detention requires arbitrary detention as its entry point.

Why Bangkok

The nearest country was the obvious one. Between 2001 and 2005 Mondulkiri and Ratanakiri were where people went, because the same peoples live on both sides of a line drawn in Paris; UNHCR opened sites there in 2001. Cambodia closed them in 2002, confined UNHCR’s protection officers to Phnom Penh, and after Easter 2004 ordered its border police to turn back anyone crossing without papers. See The Cambodian camps and Mondulkiri, 1992.

Then the closure was made explicit, three times. In September 2015 the Cambodian government told UNHCR to repatriate some two hundred Dega asylum seekers living in Phnom Penh within three months or it would “implement our immigration law and do it ourselves”; thirteen people had been granted status that March and the rest refused. In September 2017 Human Rights Watch reported twenty-nine Montagnard refugees in Cambodia facing imminent forced return, their claims rejected at first instance, with Cambodia refusing UNHCR a joint review and refusing an offer to move them to a third country. And in June 2023, after the attacks at Cu Kuin, the then prime minister announced that all Montagnards who had taken refuge in Cambodia had been expelled and that any new arrival would be sent back.

So the nearest country stopped being a destination and became a hazard on the way, and the next country along became the destination. How many of us are in Thailand nobody knows, and we do not print a single figure. The published estimates measure different things and we give them as they stand: about a hundred and fifty Montagnard families in Bangkok in March 2017; approximately one thousand five hundred in Thailand in December 2023; about five hundred “awaiting refugee status determination by the UNHCR” in October 2025; about one thousand seven hundred Vietnamese and Montagnard refugees and asylum seekers across six distinct groups in September 2022. Families against individuals, everyone against those still in the queue. There is no census of us anywhere, and there was never meant to be one.

What Bangkok was like before the mechanism existed

A reporter went to see the community in March 2017 and wrote down what people said, which is more than most of the policy literature does. Their names and their words are worth keeping.

Ayun Tre, fifty, a farmer from Gia Lai, had been imprisoned for fifteen days in 2003 for refusing to renounce his Protestant faith and arrested and beaten again in 2014. He paid smugglers a thousand dollars a head to bring his family out late in 2016, and was waiting for a UNHCR interview. “I want people to know that we do not have a good life nor justice under Vietnam’s oppressive communist regime.”

Nay Hoch, forty-five, arrested in 1987 and given five months’ hard labor, had been held in a Thai prison for working illegally and released after a pastor intervened. He was waiting for his fifth UNHCR interview. “It’s hard to live in Thailand because I’m a man and I cannot work to feed my family.”

Rmah Aloh, twenty-seven, first got out in February 2014 after taking part in a protest ten years earlier. Vietnamese police reached him in July 2015 and he went back through Laos, where he was beaten and made to sign statements he knew to be false, and where, in reprisal, his wife was raped by police. He gave that account under his own name, to a reporter in Bangkok, in March 2017. He brought her to Thailand in December 2016. “Don’t believe the communist government. They tricked me once, they will trick me again.”

Nay Bro, sixty-two, had organized in 2001 and been sentenced to seven years in February 2005. He reached Bangkok in November 2016. “I will never, ever go back. My son is still in jail. It’s been 12 years now.”

The same report gives the number that explains the five interviews and the four-year waits better than any analysis: UNHCR in Thailand then had eight trained legal staff to process four thousand asylum cases, and there were almost no Jarai–English interpreters.

The August 2018 raid, and what a UNHCR card was worth

Early on the morning of August 28, 2018, at Bang Yai in Nonthaburi province, on the north-western edge of Bangkok, Thai authorities arrested a hundred and eighty-one Vietnamese and Cambodian nationals, including more than fifty children. Most of them held UNHCR recognition. Thirty-four Cambodians went to Suan Phlu; thirty-eight Vietnamese were taken to the provincial court the next day and charged under the Immigration Act. UNHCR tried to get its own persons of concern released and failed.

“Thailand’s frequent claims about improving refugee rights ring hollow when officials detain dozens of families who are protected under UN refugee agency mandate.”

Two days later, on August 30, forty-six children between three months and seventeen years old were separated from their parents and put in four government shelters while the parents stayed in immigration detention. Eighty-five of those arrested in the August raids were Montagnards, and forty-seven Montagnard children were held by the Ministry of Social Development and Human Security. Siu H’kli, thirty, detained and HIV-positive, said: “I’m very scared, I’m in here by myself but my kids are out.” Her husband Nay Them, thirty-three, was also detained and also HIV-positive. Nay Y Khot, twenty-five: “If I get sent back I’ll go back to jail and be tortured.”

That is the world the screening mechanism was announced into.

The law, precisely

The instrument is the Regulation of the Office of the Prime Minister on the Screening of Aliens who Enter into the Kingdom and are Unable to Return to the Country of Origin, B.E. 2562. Its history is a list of delays.

• September 2016 — Thailand’s prime minister pledges a screening mechanism at the UN Leaders’ Summit on Refugees.
• December 24, 2019 — the Cabinet approves the regulation and the prime minister signs it.
• December 25, 2019 — published in the Royal Gazette, Book 136, Special Section 314.
• June 22, 2020 — entry into force, 180 days after publication, as clause 2 requires.
• March 27, 2023 — the criteria are published, with their exclusions.
• September 2023 — Sub-Division 4 of the Immigration Bureau actually begins screening in Bangkok, three years and three months after the regulation came into force, once a standard operating procedure finally existed.

Two features of the text decide everything else. The first is that the word refugee does not appear in it. What it defines is a Protected Person: an alien who cannot or will not go home “due to a reasonable ground that they would suffer danger due to persecution as determined by the Committee.” That last clause is not a legal test a court can apply. It is a delegation.

The second is who the Committee is. It is chaired by the Commissioner-General of the Royal Thai Police. Its members include the Ministries of Foreign Affairs, Social Development and Human Security, Interior, Justice and Labor; the Office of the Attorney General; and the National Intelligence Agency, the National Security Council and the Special Branch Bureau. The Commissioner of the Immigration Bureau is member and secretary. Up to four seats, out of roughly fourteen, go to independent experts who must not be civil servants.

A body chaired by the national police chief, with three security and intelligence agencies sitting on it, decides who is a refugee. Thailand’s own National Human Rights Commission said so on June 22, 2023, naming four defects: whole categories excluded; an appeal window too short; restrictions on reapplying; and a membership weighted toward officials. The Cabinet rejected its recommendations in January 2024.

The procedure, stage by stage

Where you go: Sub-Division 4 of the Immigration Bureau, Bangkhen Immigration Detention Center, Police Club, Vibhavadi Rangsit Road, Talat Bang Khen, Lak Si, Bangkok 10210. The telephone numbers UNHCR publishes are 02-024-1622 for the pre-screening stage and 02-024-5998 for the screening stage. An application may also be lodged at the detention center where a person is already held. There is no fee, and an interpreter is provided free if none is available.

And UNHCR says, in its own words, exactly where it stands in all this:

“The NSM is not part of the UNHCR process. UNHCR has no control or authority over the NSM process.”

Two systems and no bridge between them. A person can be in both at once and neither one moves the other.

What the status gives, and what it does not

• It gives protection from return to the country of origin — except on voluntary departure, and except where national security is threatened; help with voluntary return if things change at home; permission to remain in special or temporary circumstances; and coordinated access to children’s education and to healthcare “in accordance with relevant laws,” which is the hinge on which the whole sentence turns.
• It does not give a visa, a work permit, residence, or any path to citizenship. It is not equivalent to UNHCR refugee status. The deferral runs five years and is renewable, subject to an assessment of whether the country of origin has become safe.

The reading of what it is worth has narrowed over six years. In 2020 a legal commentary thought it would “theoretically” permit work permit applications. The coalition’s own guidance, written with the Immigration Bureau’s help and revised in June 2024, says flatly that it does not authorize work — though it notes that a low-cost health insurance option had been arranged by then. Asylum Access’s 2026 submission describes it as coming with no right to work, no public health insurance and no clear path to a stable status.

The door is inside the building

Here is the part that matters most, and it is not a rumor. The published list of who cannot apply includes anyone holding a valid Thai visa or permission to stay; refugees in the official border camps; migrant workers admitted from Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia or Vietnam under the labor agreements; anyone the authorities treat as a national-security concern; and anyone who has not first been prosecuted for illegal entry or illegal stay.

The regulation sits under the Immigration Act of 1979, not above it, and cannot override it. Section 81 of that Act makes any alien staying without permission liable to two years’ imprisonment or a fine of twenty thousand baht or both. Section 62 does the same for irregular entry. So the state criminalizes the people the regulation is meant to protect, and then requires the criminal conviction as the ticket into the protection.

Eight organizations wrote to the prime minister about this on December 12, 2023 — Human Rights Watch, Asylum Access Thailand, the Coalition for the Rights of Refugees and Stateless Persons, EqualAsia, Fortify Rights, the Migrant Working Group, People Serving People and the Refugee Rights Litigation Project. They asked him to use section 17 of the Act, which lets the Minister with Cabinet approval exempt any alien or group of aliens from the Act, to spare people applying for or undergoing screening from arrest, detention and prosecution. Nothing was done. The letter is nearly three years old.

One thing a Dega reader should know precisely, because it cuts the other way. Vietnamese nationality is not itself an exclusion. The migrant-worker exclusion is about people admitted under the bilateral labor agreements, not about asylum seekers. Human Rights Watch records that Thai authorities have refused to consider Lao, Hmong, Uyghur, Rohingya and North Korean applicants at all; neither that report nor Fortify Rights names Vietnamese or Montagnards among the categories shut out. On paper we are inside the eligible class. And nobody has published a single case of a Dega person being granted the status either.

The other law, and the one time we used it

Thailand’s Act on Prevention and Suppression of Torture and Enforced Disappearance was published in the Royal Gazette on October 25, 2022 and came into force on February 22, 2023. An emergency decree tried to postpone parts of it and the Constitutional Court struck that down on May 18, 2023. Section 13 was never touched:

“No state agency or state authority shall expel, return, or extradite a person to another State, if there are substantial grounds for believing that the person would be in danger of being subjected to torture, to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment, or to enforced disappearance.”

Beside it stands section 12: “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability, or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of an offence under this Act.”

And then section 34, which routes enforcement of the whole Act to the criminal courts for corruption and misconduct cases. That is not obviously a provision an ordinary criminal court hearing an extradition application will read as giving it a power to refuse. Which is what happened.

Y Quynh Buondap: the only time Thai refugee law was tested on one of us

His life belongs on his own page. What belongs here is the legal sequence, because his is the only case in which a Dega person’s protection under Thai law was argued in a Thai court and decided.

He left Vietnam in 2018 and UNHCR recognized him as a refugee that year. On January 19 and 20, 2024 a five-judge mobile court in Dak Lak convicted him in absentia, one of about a hundred defendants, and gave him ten years for terrorism. On March 6, 2024 Vietnam’s Ministry of Public Security designated Montagnards Stand for Justice a terrorist organization.

On June 4, 2024 Thai police came to his house and stationed themselves outside, waiting to arrest him on Vietnam’s extradition request; Thailand’s own National Human Rights Commission intervened. On June 10 he attended an asylum interview at the Canadian Embassy, and afterward was moved to a safe place to await Canada’s decision. He was arrested on June 11, 2024, one year to the day after the Cu Kuin attacks.

On July 4, 2024 United Nations special rapporteurs issued a public warning: “We urge Thailand to refuse his extradition and any other requests to forcibly repatriate Montagnards seeking protection,” and “We believe that, if extradited, Y Quynh Bdap would be at risk of enforced disappearance and torture.” The same release urged Thailand to recognize Montagnards’ refugee status in domestic law “particularly through the National Screening Mechanism.” That is the United Nations, ten months into the mechanism’s life, publicly asking Thailand to use it for us. It was not used.

On August 16, 2024 the International Commission of Jurists filed a brief with the Bangkok Criminal Court on non-refoulement. Hearings ran on August 19 and 30 and September 2; he appeared shackled and in prison uniform, and answered “No” when asked whether he would return voluntarily. One session ran from two in the afternoon until ten at night. His lawyer, Nadthasiri Bergman, said of section 13: “The Court must be cautious in employing it because [the law] is a milestone; it is a foundation.”

On September 30, 2024, in Courtroom 807, the court granted the extradition. Two weeks later eleven United Nations mandates set out what the court had done, and the two sentences together are the whole of it:

“The Thai Criminal Court acknowledged that section 13 of Thailand’s Prevention and Suppression of Torture and Enforced Disappearance Act prohibits extradition when there is a substantial risk of torture or ill-treatment upon return.”

“However, the Court ruled that it did not have the authority to assess whether the Vietnamese judicial process adhered to due process standards in prosecuting and punishing Mr. Bdap.”

The same experts said of the trial he had been given in Dak Lak: “The mobile court lacked a clear legal basis and was not independent of political influence. It was a prejudicial tool to collectively shame the defendants, without properly assessing individual responsibility.” And: “The terrorism charges were vague and overly broad. The trial was not fair according to international law.”

So the law said he could not be sent. The court agreed the law said that. And the court then held that it could not look at the thing the law required it to look at.

On November 26, 2025 the Court of Appeal upheld the extradition. The verdict hearing was given one day’s notice. The court found there was “no real risk” of torture or enforced disappearance, relying on diplomatic assurances from Vietnam’s Ministry of Public Security that he would be treated according to international standards. Two days later, on November 28, 2025, he was handed over. He was thirty-three. His family and his lawyers could not find him for hours afterwards.

A week later ten United Nations experts said the two things that still stand:

“Thailand is also bound by its Prevention and Suppression of Torture and Enforced Disappearance Act (2022), which expressly prohibits the expulsion, deportation or extradition of a person to a State where there are substantial grounds for believing that the person would be at real risk of torture or enforced disappearance.”

“His current whereabouts in Viet Nam remain unknown.”

That was December 3, 2025. As this page is written, in September 2026, it is still true. A joint statement in February 2026 records that he is serving the ten-year sentence, and names no prison. No independent party has confirmed where he is held; no consular or family visit has been publicly reported; Vietnam has published nothing.

What has happened since the mechanism opened

The mechanism began work in September 2023. What follows happened afterwards, and in none of it does the mechanism appear.

November 24, 2023. At six in the morning police broke down doors at Bang Yai and arrested eleven Montagnards, part of seventeen arrests over the preceding months. Nine of the seventeen had already been granted refugee status. Among them were Nay-Luyn, son of Thoan Siu, who held refugee documentation and was arrested anyway, and Y Khuong Eban, whose family had completed their UNHCR interview a month earlier. All eleven were convicted of illegal entry and residence, charged five thousand baht in trial fees, and moved to the detention center. The mechanism had been operating for three months, and nobody was offered it.

March 14, 2024. Eight Vietnamese police officers came to Bang Len district in Nakhon Pathom province, about sixty kilometers from Bangkok, and questioned Dega refugees. Two did the questioning in plain clothes. They identified themselves as from the Dak Lak homeland security force and the Gia Lai provincial police, and among them were the director of Gia Lai police and a lieutenant colonel. They showed arrest warrants and photographs and asked where six people convicted in absentia were. What they offered was transport, food and accommodation, and the police director as a “guardian”: “Once you return to Vietnam, we’ll take care of everything.” What they threatened was arrest for those who refused. One refugee’s answer: “If we returned to Vietnam, we would die. We would never be safe.”

The Thai police colonel for the district said he had received no request authorizing the Vietnamese officers’ presence. An unnamed Thai security official called the visit “undiplomatic.” It was the first known instance of Vietnamese police questioning Vietnamese refugees on Thai soil.

February 23, 2025. A Sunday, a community hall in Nonthaburi, a memorial service organized by Y Quynh Buondap’s wife for her mother, who had died in Vietnam. Police detained the mourners. What happened next is reported three irreconcilable ways by three organizations with staff on the ground, and we print all three rather than choose.

The gap between forty-three UNHCR cards and five UNHCR-recognized refugees is probably the difference between recognized refugees and registered asylum seekers, and we say that as a reading and not as a fact. The rest we cannot reconcile. What is not in doubt is the last line: three people were kept in detention because of a warrant issued in Vietnam. A Vietnamese arrest warrant operated inside a Thai bail decision, and all three were still refused bail in November 2025.

One of the detainees, Y Misin Knul, described the day: “They acted very quickly… We requested attorneys to be present, but they rushed the process to avoid the attorneys.”

October 29, 2025. About five in the morning, Immigration Bureau officers detained seventy Montagnards in Nonthaburi. Forty-two were recognized refugees or waiting on a decision. Twenty who had previously been bailed were released; the rest went to Suan Phlu; fines of five thousand baht each. No formal charges were announced.

The report that followed, in November 2025, rests on interviews with thirty-four Vietnamese refugees and asylum seekers in Bangkok between July and October 2025, and it carries onto the international record what our own people in detention had been saying since February 2025: that Vietnamese police were coming into Thai immigration detention, from February through May and afterwards, to press detainees to sign voluntary repatriation documents. Thirty-four of them said so, to interviewers, in Bangkok. Three of the things detainees say they were told:

“First they say they’ll be more lenient if you agree to return. Of course we don’t believe them. They have been harassing our community for a long time.”

“You’ve been here [in Thailand] for a long time, and still not been resettled to the United States… If you stay here and the government makes problems for you, then you can call us.”

“All Montagnards here are terrorists. We’ll tell them [Thai police] that you’re terrorists, and if you worship together [in church], the Thai police are to arrest you.”

Read the third one twice. Vietnam’s terrorist designation of March 2024 is being used inside a Thai detention center as an instruction to Thai police about who may go to church.

A Hmong group went through the same sequence in parallel: thirteen people, all UNHCR-registered, arrested between March 28 and April 22, 2025; Vietnamese officials visiting them on April 27 and May 7 to invite them home and ask for signatures; and all of them refusing.

Suan Phlu

The building is the Bangkok Immigration Detention Center at 507 Soi Suan Phlu, Sathorn Road, in Thung Maha Mek. Its official capacity is about eleven hundred. There is no physician on site, a nurse comes daily, detainees are required to pay for medical care, and access to lawyers is infrequent. Nine deaths in detention have been recorded there. Detainee testimony describes cells shared with two hundred and fifty people, and two hundred people at roughly half a square meter each.

Thailand operates twenty-two immigration detention centers, and the Immigration Bureau does not publish their locations, their populations or the origins of the people in them.

There is no statutory maximum period of immigration detention in Thai law. Forty-eight Uyghurs were held for more than ten years; five died over that period and two more in 2023; about forty Uyghur men were returned to China in February 2025 after a decade inside. In March 2025 six unaccompanied Rohingya children between fourteen and seventeen disappeared from a government shelter in Chiang Mai and have not been found. These are not Dega cases. They are the record the Dega community in Bangkok reads, and after the Uyghur returns people said so out loud: “Refugees here are not safe, not just the Uyghurs… If the United States does not condemn them, they will treat Vietnamese refugees the same way in the future.”

Bail is money and a guarantor. UNHCR publishes the practice plainly: usually fifty thousand baht, a Thai citizen as guarantor, and monthly reporting to the detention center with that guarantor; failure to report means revocation. And:

“UNHCR cannot pay for bail and cannot act as a guarantor.”

The exit that closed

Resettlement was the only real way out, and it narrowed and then shut.

In September 2022, of roughly seventeen hundred Vietnamese and Montagnard refugees and asylum seekers in Thailand, the only functioning route was Canadian private sponsorship — five to ten families a year. On January 20, 2025 a United States executive order suspended the refugee admissions program, described at first as a ninety-day pause. In February a former resettlement officer put the number of Vietnamese refugees in Thailand affected at about fifteen hundred and called it “the most direct and significant impact on refugees in general, and on Vietnamese refugees in Thailand in particular.”

The effect on one family, followed by a reporter in June 2025: An and Ngoc, with daughters of eleven and nine, fled in 2018 and were selected for private sponsorship late in 2024. Ngoc: “Trump said it would only be a 90-day pause. But it’s been over four months now.” An was arrested on May 27, 2025 while selling sugarcane juice, could not pay eight thousand baht in court fees, and served sixteen days.

Recognized by UNHCR; selected for resettlement; resettlement frozen; arrested for selling juice; jailed for want of eight thousand baht. That is the whole trap in one family.

What the numbers are, and what the state will not publish

• Seven. Four independent statements — May 2025, July 2025, April 2026 and June 2026 — all give seven Protected Persons. The earliest dates them “as of October 2024.” Put together, that means all seven were granted within the first thirteen months, and that between October 2024 and April 2026 the Committee granted the status to nobody.
• More than 5,500 urban refugees and asylum seekers in Thailand, outside the border camps.
• Seventy percent of refugees surveyed in 2026 had never heard of the mechanism at all.
• Nothing else. The number of applications filed, the number found eligible, the number refused, the number of appeals, the nationalities of the seven — none of it is published. The most serious academic study of the mechanism gives no statistics either. The denominator of the seven is a state secret.

There is one more finding, and it is a silence. The eighteen-organization joint statement of July 2026 on Vietnam’s reach into Thailand does not mention the screening mechanism. Nor does the November 2025 report on Vietnamese refugees in Bangkok. Nor does the January 2026 country study of Thai detention. Three years in, the organizations working hardest on our people in Thailand have stopped treating it as part of the answer.

What a person should actually do

This is not legal advice and we are not lawyers. It is what the published rules say, set out honestly.

• Register with UNHCR and keep the papers. The card will not stop an arrest. It is still what organizations, embassies and eventually a court will ask to see. Keep a photograph of it somewhere separate from the card.
• Understand where the door is. A person at liberty who has never been prosecuted is not eligible for the screening mechanism. That is not a rumor; it is how the guidance written with the Immigration Bureau describes the rule.
• If detained, ask in writing for form KG.1 and say the words “Protected Person.” Clause 15 requires officials to defer repatriation once an alien claims reasonable grounds, and the thirty-day clock only starts when a request exists. The office is Sub-Division 4 of the Immigration Bureau at the Bangkhen detention center, on 02-024-1622 and 02-024-5998, and a request can also be filed where you are held.
• Watch the two short deadlines. Fifteen days to appeal a refusal of eligibility. Sixty days from an eligibility finding to file the full application, or it is treated as abandoned. Thailand’s own human rights commission said both were too short.
• Know the price of bail before you need it. Usually fifty thousand baht and a Thai guarantor, plus monthly reporting. UNHCR will not pay and will not stand surety. Find out in advance which organization might.
• Do not sign a repatriation form. Vietnamese officials have come into Suan Phlu and asked for signatures. The Hmong group in April and May 2025 refused, and that is a thing a person is entitled to do.
• Have the names ready. Asylum Access Thailand; the Coalition for the Rights of Refugees and Stateless Persons and its guidance on the mechanism; the Cross Cultural Foundation; UNHCR Thailand’s help site.
• Know what you would be getting. Five years of deferred deportation, renewable; an identity document; schooling and healthcare “in accordance with relevant laws”; no work permit, no visa, no residence, no citizenship. Seven people have it.

See also: Y Quynh Buondap, Asylum today, The Cambodian camps, Reporting safely.

Sources

• Regulation of the Office of the Prime Minister on the Screening of Aliens who Enter into the Kingdom and are Unable to Return to the Country of Origin, B.E. 2562 — Royal Gazette, December 25, 2019, Book 136, Special Section 314; in force June 22, 2020. Read in Asylum Access’s unofficial English translation, which notes that the Thai original prevails. Clause 3 (definitions), clause 5 (the Committee), clauses 15–19 and 21 and 24 (procedure), clause 25 (what the status confers)
• Prima Sukmanop, “Thailand’s National Screening Mechanism: Initiating ‘Asylum’ Procedures in a Non-Signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention,” Chulalongkorn University Law Journal 43:1 (2025), pp. 59–94 — Sub-Division 4 beginning work in September 2023 (p. 61), the five-year document (p. 71), and the surety and security deposit for living outside detention (p. 70)
• Coalition for the Rights of Refugees and Stateless Persons, NSM FAQ, prepared with guidance from Sub-Division 4 of the Immigration Bureau, last revised June 30, 2024 — the form codes KG.1, KG.5 and KG.8, the categories excluded, the requirement of prior prosecution, and what the status does not confer
• UNHCR Thailand, help site, National Screening Mechanism page — “The NSM is not part of the UNHCR process. UNHCR has no control or authority over the NSM process,” and the Bangkhen address and telephone numbers, verified against the page; and the detention and deportation page for bail and “UNHCR cannot pay for bail and cannot act as a guarantor”
• Act on Prevention and Suppression of Torture and Enforced Disappearance, B.E. 2565 — Royal Gazette, October 25, 2022; in force February 22, 2023. Sections 12, 13 and 34, read in the Wikisource English translation
• Asylum Access Thailand and partners, joint submission to the fourth-cycle Universal Periodic Review of Thailand, April 10, 2026 — seven Protected Persons in thirty months; more than 5,500 urban refugees; seventy percent who had never heard of the mechanism; and “the system designed to prevent arbitrary detention requires arbitrary detention as its entry point”
• Fortify Rights — May 8, 2025 (seven, “as of October 2024”) and June 11, 2026; the January 18, 2024 statement on the Cabinet’s rejection of the National Human Rights Commission’s recommendations; the briefing note on the March 27, 2023 exclusions; and the October 2018 report on the separation of forty-six children from their parents
• United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights — July 4, 2024; October 16, 2024, quoted above and verified word for word; and December 3, 2025, likewise verified. Also communication AL VNM 3/2025 of July 24, 2025, for the February 2025 detentions and the three refused bail
• Human Rights Watch — August 30, 2018 on the Bang Yai raid; December 12, 2023, the eight-organization letter on section 17; November 13, 2025, on the October raid and on Vietnamese police inside Thai detention, resting on thirty-four interviews in Bangkok between July and October 2025; and the September 2017 statement on the twenty-nine in Cambodia
• Athena Tacet, “Vietnam’s Montagnards: Refugees in limbo in Thailand,” Al Jazeera, March 24, 2017 — Ayun Tre, Nay Hoch, Rmah Aloh, Nay Bro and Ro.o Y Brik in their own words; the pastor Pornchai Kamonsin; and the eight UNHCR legal staff for four thousand cases
• Radio Free Asia and BenarNews — November 27, 2023 on the eleven arrested at Bang Yai; March 15, 2024 on the Vietnamese police visit to Nakhon Pathom; September 30, 2024 on the extradition ruling; February 26, 2025 on the funeral raid; February and June 2025 on the effect of the suspension of United States refugee admissions
• Global Detention Project, on the Bangkok Immigration Detention Center and on Thailand’s detention and coerced returns of Vietnamese refugees (January 22, 2026) — the capacity, the nine deaths, the absence of a resident physician, and the twenty-two detention centers whose data is not published
• International Commission of Jurists, legal brief on non-refoulement filed in the extradition proceedings, August 16, 2024; and FIDH and Amnesty International on the appeal ruling of November 26, 2025
• Cross Cultural Foundation, September 4, 2024, and HaRDstories, September 12, 2024 — the conduct of the hearings, the shackles, and Nadthasiri Bergman on section 13
• Immigration Act B.E. 2522 (1979), sections 11, 12, 17, 54, 62 and 81 — read in the transcription published by a Thai law library rather than in the Royal Thai Police translation, which we could not retrieve

Compiled September 2026. Figures and quotations come from United Nations documents, from Thai and international organizations working inside the process, and from the published text of the two Thai instruments; no Vietnamese state source is used, including for Vietnam’s own position. Where three organizations published three different accounts of the same arrests, all three are set out above rather than reconciled. Thai place and personal names follow the spelling used by the source reporting them. This page describes a procedure that changes; the law cited here is as it stood in September 2026.