A provincial court in southern Thailand has sentenced a man to 35 years in jail for trafficking nearly 100 Rohingya refugees, some of whom had died from suffocation.
The provincial court of the southern province of Nakhon Si Thammarat on Wednesday, 31 August 2016, sentenced Sunon Saengthong, an alleged human trafficker, to 35 years imprisonment and a fine of 666,000 baht, the Migrant Working Group reported.
The court handed one year jail terms to Suriya Yodrak and Warachai Chadathong, Sunon’s collaborators. Suriya’s jail term, however, was halved to six months because he pleaded guilty.
The three were accused of being involved in the trafficking of a group 98 Rohingyas refugees (30 men, 26 women and 42 minors younger than 15 years) on 11 January 2015 from Ranong to Songkhla Province, passing through Hua Sai District. Among the refugees, some were found dead from suffocation.
Sunon was convicted of offences under the 2008 Anti-Trafficking in Persons Act for trafficking people — including children younger than 15 years of age — and for offences related to liberty due to having enslaved or forced a person to work. He was also charged for crimes under the 1979 Immigration Act for bringing, harboring and providing illegal immigrants a hiding place.
Sunon’s conviction was attributed to major evidence showing the bank transactions and telephone contacts of a trafficking syndicate, some of whose victims had been rescued in Songkhla.
As for Suriya and Warachai, they were only convicted of the Immigration Act for collaborating with Sunnon.
Thailand’s Immigration Act does not recognise refugees, even though thousands of refugees and asylum seekers enter Thailand legally and illegally each year. Since the state does not provide any formal recognition or services for refugees, many are forced to go underground and in many cases fall prey to human traffickers.
According to Veerawit Tianchainan, the founder and executive director of the Thai Committee for Refugees Foundation (TCR), there are thousands of other refugees besides the Rohingya who have fled war, persecution and poverty and who are now awaiting resettlement in third-party countries. Many stay illegally in Thailand in fear of being arrested by authorities.