In recent years, dozens of activists fleeing repression in Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos and Thailand have been sent back to seek asylum, or in some cases have been killed or disappeared. Human rights groups believe there is an unwritten agreement between the four neighboring countries that allows each other’s security forces to harass dissidents across the border.
Last November, Thailand sent six Cambodian dissidents and a young child back to Cambodia, where they were immediately jailed. All of them were recognized as refugees by the UN. Earlier this year, Thailand also sent a Vietnamese mountaineer activist to Vietnam.
In the past, Thai anti-monarchy activists have been abducted and disappeared in Laos, with Thai security forces widely believed to be operating outside their own borders. In 2020, a young Thai activist who fled to Cambodia, Vanchalerm Satsaxit, was kidnapped and disappearedagain, Thai operatives suggest.
Cambodian authorities did little to investigate and announced last year that they had closed the case. Perhaps the same will happen with Lim Kimia.
“Thailand was de facto running the ‘swap arrangement,'” says Phil Robertson, Thailand director of the Asian Human Rights and Labor Organization.
“Dissidents and refugees are traded for political and economic favors with neighboring countries. The growing practice of transnational repression in the Mekong sub-region must be stopped immediately.”
When U.S.- and British-educated Hun Mane succeeded his father as Cambodia’s prime minister, there was some speculation about whether he might rule with a lighter hand. But opposition figures continue to be persecuted and thrown into prison, and the little space left for political dissent has been almost completely closed.
After his semi-retirement, Hun Sen’s figure still looms over his son’s administration; now he’s calling for new legislation to brand anyone who tries to replace him as terrorists.
Thailand, which lobbied hard for a seat on the UN Human Rights Council this year, will now be under pressure to show it can bring to justice those behind such brazen killing on the streets of its capital.
