Executive Summary

Kaung[1], who was born in Thailand of Burmese parents, was ten
years old when a trafficker paid his estranged father 1,000 baht (US$25) for him
while his mother was temporarily away from home. The trafficker then resold him
to a gang that operated begging rings in Bangkok.

Kaung lived
with two other boys and one girl while working in a begging gang. They were
locked in the home of the traffickers, where they slept on the floor with no
blankets or mosquito netting. Each day, the traffickers gave Kaung approximately
one cup of ramen noodles, which he had to share with another boy. This was his
only food, leaving him constantly hungry.

According to
Kaung, the traffickers beat him with a metal rod, stuck him with needles and
burnt him with cigarettes. He also witnessed severe abuses against the other
children. The traffickers took one of the boys away one day. When he came back,
he no longer had hands or feet. Kaung believes that the traffickers had severed
his limbs to keep him from running away.

Hundreds of thousands of refugees from Burma, many of
them women and children, have fled into neighboring Thailand in the course of
the past two decades. Escaping armed conflict and rampant human rights
violations in their homeland, these refugees often find that safety eludes them
during and after crossing the Thai border. The failure of Thailand to offer them
meaningful protection puts them at risk of continued human rights abuses,
including trafficking. Women and children are particularly at risk of
trafficking, and the sexual and physical exploitation and forced labor
associated with it, as they desperately seek a way to support themselves and
their families.

The
international community has paid tremendous attention to the growing phenomenon
of trafficking in recent years. In 2000, this focus resulted in the issuance of
the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress, and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially
Women and Children to the UN Convention on Transnational Organized Crime. The
purpose of the protocol is to prevent and combat trafficking in persons, with
special attention to women and children; to protect and assist victims of
trafficking, with respect for their human rights; and to promote cooperation
among countries that have ratified the protocol in order to achieve those
objectives. The protocol also explicitly acknowledges that the agreement does
not supersede states’ obligations under international humanitarian, human rights
and refugee law, including the principle of non-return that is the core of the
international refugee protection framework laid out in the 1951 Convention and
the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of
Refugees.

Thailand is not, however, a party to the 1951 Convention.
The Thai government characterizes refugees as “displaced people fleeing
fighting,” a definition that does not comply with international law and excludes
large numbers of refugees from Burma. It is also narrowly applied to people
“fleeing active fighting,”[2]
Refugee camps are referred to as “temporary shelters” although many refugees,
such as the ethnic Karens and Karennis, have been warehoused in border camps for
decades.[3]

The
majority of Burmese[4]
who have not been designated as refugees under that narrow interpretation are
deemed “illegal” by the Thai government, regardless of the person’s reason for
entering Thailand. This includes hundreds of thousands of migrant workers.

However, when questioned about their motivation to come
to Thailand, almost without fail migrant workers cite the political repression,
armed conflict and economic devastation in Burma that has directly resulted from
years of despotic rule. The Shan people, for example, despite fleeing from
well-documented persecution by the Burmese military, are regarded as “illegal
migrants” under Thai law and thus denied any protection. Clearly, labeling such
individuals “illegal” and characterizing them as “migrant workers” is
inaccurate, when in fact many—if not most—are people in refugee-like
circumstances.

Regardless of their status, moreover, the vast majority
of Burmese residing in Thailand have extremely limited means to support
themselves and their families. They eke out a subsistence living, are
marginalized in the Thai economy and exploited as a cheap source of labor. They
often support not only themselves, but also family members who live with them in
Thailand or who remain behind in Burma. They live in fear of detection by the
Thai authorities, not only because they are vulnerable to deportation back to
Burma but also because the authorities will often exploit their lack of status
to extort bribes from them.

Refugees who live in refugee camps along the Thai-Burma
border also face specific risks. While some NGOs put tremendous effort into
creating income generation activities for women inside the camps, it is
insufficient. As a result, despite Thai policy which requires prior written
approval to enter or leave the camps, people leave surreptitiously to work on
nearby farms for less than the wages paid to Thais; many simply abandon the
camps permanently to seek relatively better wage labor in urban or semi-urban
areas. Refugees who leave the camps are vulnerable to arrest, harassment,
extortion and trafficking.

Forced into an underground existence by their lack of
status and precarious living conditions, Burmese in Thailand are at strong risk
of being trafficked. Such trafficking can occur at various points during the
migration experience, including before the individual has crossed the border,
during the border crossing or once present in Thailand itself. It may result
from force, coercion or deception. After being trafficked, women and children
may end up in a range of abusive situations, including forced prostitution,
children forced to beg on the streets of Bangkok or other urban areas, young
women working as domestic servants or entire families working in substandard and
dangerous labor conditions in textile factories, fishing or other industrial
settings.

Sometimes, the trafficked person is not paid at all or is
paid a wage far below that promised or allowed under Thai law. Consistently,
labor conditions for trafficked persons are appalling, characterized by long
hours and physical and sexual abuse. Some women working as domestic servants
reported that their inability to speak Thai left them isolated, and the nature
of their work, which often involves living in their employers’ homes, left them
profoundly vulnerable to abuse.

Moreover, the fear of deportation haunts people living
without status. Even workers who were registered for employment with the Thai
government stated that some employers held on to their registration cards
despite Thai law stating the workers must keep the card with them at all
times.[5]
They also spoke of instances in which police officers, despite being shown the
worker registration card, still demanded a bribe. Women and children may be
especially susceptible to maltreatment, and are reluctant to complain. As such,
the capacity to report abuses they experience is an inseparable issue from their
insecure status in Thailand. Such apprehensions are grounded both in the fear of
persecution by the Burmese military if returned as well as the fear of stranding
their families without economic support if they lose their source of income, as
abusive as their employment situation might be.

Despite the fact that the vast majority of Burmese living
in Thailand cannot safely return home, the solution for trafficked persons
apprehended in Thailand is typically deportation. Burmese who are apprehended by
the Thai authorities may be detained before being deported. Some are deported
with prior notification to the Burmese government. Others who have been
designated as refugees or “persons of concern” by the UN High Commissioner for
Refugees (UNHCR) Regional Office for Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam are
rounded up, detained and informally deported to border areas without prior
notification to the Burmese government.

This
emphasis on repatriation is rarely challenged and sometimes supported by
international agencies and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) working with
trafficked persons. Return is often viewed as necessary to deter and prevent
future trafficking. It is also often characterized as harmless, because it is
widely acknowledged that most deported Burmese return to Thailand at the
earliest possible opportunity. This rationale for repatriation, however, is
troublesome; by having to return to Thailand a second or sometimes multiple
times, the refugee is at risk of either being identified and targeted by the
Burmese military upon return to the homeland, or when migrating back to
Thailand, of being swept up in the same cycle of violence and exploitation they
experienced when trafficked the first time. Often the person returns to Thailand
burdened with greater debt, either from having to bribe officials en route or as
part of the costs of resettling in Thailand. The cycle of repatriation and
return leaves people even more vulnerable to traffickers, and bolsters corrupt
practices at the local level.

What
is clearly missing in the dialogue on trafficking in Thailand is a holistic,
rights-based approach that addresses the root causes of migration from Burma to
Thailand. This new approach casts an analytical net wide enough to consider the
unique vulnerabilities to trafficking as experienced by both recognized and
unrecognized refugees in Thailand. New solutions must be sought that take into
consideration the reality that for many Burmese nationals repatriation is
neither a safe nor viable option. Trafficking of persons who are in refugee-like
circumstances must be considered within the international refugee framework,
which traditionally has promoted the durable solutions of local integration,
third country resettlement or safe, dignified and voluntary return. Even in the
absence of ratification of the Refugee Convention, Thailand—with the support of
the international community—must abide by these principles.