Thailand\u2019s immigration chief has vowed not to force refugees to return home \u201cinvoluntarily\u201d, after a Saudi woman\u2019s desperate plea for resettlement drew global attention to a country that does not recognise asylum seekers.<\/p>\n
Many cases do not make headlines but that changed earlier this month when 18-year-old Saudi runaway Rahaf Mohammed al-Qunun arrived in Bangkok and staved off deportation by barricading herself in a hotel at the airport, live-tweeting the standoff to an international audience.<\/p>\n
She was handed over to the UN refugee agency within days and resettled to Canada within a week, where she was welcomed by Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland after landing in Toronto on Saturday.Qunun said she suffered abuse in the ultra-conservative kingdom and refused to see family members who came to Thailand after her flight.<\/p>\n
Responding to questions about Thailand\u2019s treatment of refugees, Surachate told an audience at the foreign correspondents\u2019 club on Wednesday he would take a new approach and that under his supervision \u201cthere will be no one involuntarily sent back to the country if they don\u2019t want to go back\u201d.<\/p>\n
But the claims were met with scepticism given the November arrest in Thailand of refugee footballer Hakeem Alaraibi, who had been granted permanent residency in Australia but was stopped at the airport in Bangkok while trying to go on vacation.<\/p>\n
Alaraibi, a former player for Bahrain\u2019s national team, is wanted on charges relating to the damage of a police station during the Arab Spring in the Gulf State, but rights groups say he was playing a match at the time and the allegations are false.Surachate said the case was different as there was an outstanding arrest warrant for Alaraibi in Bahrain, but said that he could argue his case in court.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Thailand\u2019s immigration chief has vowed not to force refugees to return home \u201cinvoluntarily\u201d, after a Saudi woman\u2019s desperate plea for resettlement drew global attention to a country that does not recognise asylum seekers. Many cases do not make headlines but that changed earlier this month when 18-year-old Saudi runaway Rahaf Mohammed al-Qunun arrived in Bangkok […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":52881,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-52880","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52880","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52880"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52880\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52882,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52880\/revisions\/52882"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/52881"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52880"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52880"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52880"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}