Amnesty Condemns Malaysia: You Can’t Protect Refugees By Rounding Them Up

Amnesty International has condemned Malaysia after police detained more than 100 Rohingya asylum seekers outside the UNHCR compound in Kuala Lumpur — in a country that hosts 215,000 refugees but legally recognises none of them.

Amnesty Malaysia/The Lancet

In Brief

Over 110 Rohingya refugees were rounded up by police outside the UNHCR office in Kuala Lumpur on 27 July.
Malaysia hosts over 126,000 Rohingya refugees but has not signed the 1951 Refugee Convention, leaving them legally unprotected.
Amnesty International warns Malaysia cannot build a credible refugee protection system while detaining and removing the people it hosts.

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They came by bus.

After being threatened with eviction from their settlement in Penang, more than 100 Rohingya men, women and children did what anyone would do when they have nowhere else to go — they went to the one address that was supposed to mean something.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) office in Kuala Lumpur.

Police were waiting.

By Monday night (27 July), 110 of them had been loaded onto trucks and driven to national police headquarters, and by Tuesday (28 July), authorities said they had been moved to “a location designated by a non-governmental organisation.”

That was the full official account of where 110 people went.

Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim later said the government would not compromise on refugees who violated national laws or disrupted public order.

A Country That Hosts Refugees It Does Not Recognise

Amnesty International Malaysia did not mince its words.

Malaysia cannot build a credible refugee protection system while simultaneously treating refugees as people to be rounded up, detained, and removed.

The irony is structural, not accidental.

Malaysia currently shelters more than 215,000 refugees and asylum seekers — one of Southeast Asia’s largest such populations.

Of those, more than 126,000 are Rohingya, making them the single largest refugee community in the country.

Malaysia has not signed the 1951 Refugee Convention, and it does not formally recognise refugee status, which means every one of those 126,000 people is, in the eyes of Malaysian law, not a refugee.

Just an undocumented person who can be arrested, detained, or deported at any time.

They are here; they officially are not.

Longer-Term Solutions, for People With No Short-Term Ones

The Rohingya have been fleeing Myanmar for decades — a Muslim minority that has faced what the UN has described as ethnic cleansing.

In Malaysia, they have recently faced something else: an organised online campaign that rights advocates say is deliberately stoking xenophobia and public hostility.

The eviction threat in Penang did not happen in a vacuum; neither did the police trucks outside the UNHCR compound.

UNHCR said it “supported dialogue among stakeholders to find longer-term solutions.”

Longer-term solutions.

For people who have been here long enough to become the country’s largest refugee community, with limited access to work, schooling, and healthcare — and who, recently, found out that the UNHCR compound is not a safe address either.

Foreign Minister Datuk Seri Mohamad Hasan had gone further — warning that Malaysia may reconsider allowing UNHCR to operate in the country at all if the agency refused to cooperate on refugee screening.