Volker Türk, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said the forced return of the Uyghurs, who had been detained in Thailand for over 11 years, was deeply troubling.

“This violates the principle of non-refoulement for which there is a complete prohibition in cases where there is a real risk of torture, ill-treatment, or other irreparable harm upon their return,” he said.

Contained in Article 3 of the Convention against Torture, the principle prohibits returning individuals to a country where they face a risk of persecution, torture or ill-treatment. It is also referred to in Article 7 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The right to seek asylum and of non-refoulement are also enshrined in Article 13 of Thailand’s Prevention and Suppression of Torture and Enforced Disappearance Act, and Article 16 of the ASEAN Human Rights Declaration.

Detained since 2014

The deported men were part of a larger group of Uyghurs who were detained in Thailand in March 2014, after leaving China, bound for Türkiye.

For over a decade, they were held in immigration detention centres under poor conditions.

According to OHCHR, five members of the group have died in custody, while eight others remain detained in Thailand.

Halt further deportations

The UN rights chief also urged the Thai Government to halt any further deportations and ensure the protection of the remaining Uyghurs in detention.

“The Thai authorities must ensure there are no further deportations and the remaining members of the group, including potential refugees and asylum-seekers, being held in Thailand are fully protected in accordance with their obligations under international law,” he added.

UNHCR decries forced returns

UNHCR also condemned the deportation, saying it had repeatedly sought access to the detained Uyghurs and assurances they would not be forcibly returned – a request that has so far been denied.

Ruvendrini Menikdiwela, Assistant High Commissioner for Protection, reiterated that it is a “clear violation” of the non-refoulement principle and the Government’s obligations under international law.

“UNHCR calls on the Royal Thai Government to put an end to the forced return of individuals from Thailand,” she said.

Call for transparency

High Commissioner Türk also urged the Chinese authorities to reveal the whereabouts of the deported Uyghurs.

“It is now important for the Chinese authorities to disclose their whereabouts, and to ensure that they are treated in accordance with international human rights standards,” he said.

Mr. Türk – making his closing remarks during the session reporting on the Occupied Palestinian Territory at the Human Rights Council – said he was deeply troubled by the “dangerous manipulation of language” and disinformation that surrounds discussions over the Palestine-Israel conflict.

“We need to make sure that we resist all efforts to spread fear or incite hatred, including abhorrent, dehumanizing narratives, whether they’re insidious or explicit,” he said.

“My Office will continue to work for justice for every victim and survivor by establishing and documenting the facts and standing firmly for accountability and the rule of law without exception.”

Eritrean troops continue grave violations in Ethiopia

The rights body then turned its focus to Eritrea on Thursday, where despite some long-awaited progress in improving the lives of ordinary Eritreans, the country’s authorities remain responsible for widespread alleged serious crimes including inside neighbouring Ethiopia, the forum heard.

Ilze Brands Kehris, UN Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights, said that the Eritrean Defence Forces have continued to carry out grave crimes in Ethiopia’s Tigray region and elsewhere with total impunity.

“Our Office (OHCHR) has credible information that Eritrean Defence Forces remain in Tigray and are committing violations, including abductions, rape, property looting, and arbitrary arrests,” she told the Council, before calling for the immediate withdrawal of Eritrean soldiers.

After a rapprochement between former enemies Eritrea and Ethiopia in 2018, Asmara sent troops to fight alongside Ethiopian federal troops against separatist rebels during the two-year conflict in Tigray, Amhara, Afar and Oromia.

No justice in sight

“In the current context, there is no likely prospect that the domestic judicial system will hold perpetrators accountable for the violations committed in the context of the Tigray conflict and in other cases,” the UN official told the Council, the world’s foremost human rights body.

In a debate seeking to address the Council’s longstanding concerns about Eritrea’s human rights record, Ms. Brands Kehris acknowledged the efforts being made by the authorities in boosting essential health services to more than one million newborns, children and women last year with the help of the UN – and in ratifying the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in December.

Conscription abuses continue

However, “serious concerns remain” about Eritrea’s system of indefinite forced military conscription, the UN official continued.

The practice has long been linked to abusive labour, torture and sexual violence which continues to compel young people to escape from the country, Ms. Brands-Kehris insisted.

Furthermore, “the punishment of families of draft deserters remains very common – an inhumane practice, against which no steps have been taken”, she said.

Echoing previous disturbing reports requested by the Human Rights on Eritrea’s rights record, the UN official said that detention without trial “remains the norm” – with many politicians, journalists, religious believers and draft deserters held incommunicado.

There is no evidence that impunity will be tackled for well-documented past human rights violations, the senior UN official said.

In response for Eritrea, Habtom Zerai Ghirmai, Chargé d’affaires a.i. to the UN in Geneva, denied the accusations, calling them exaggerated and misleading.

Sudan: We are looking into the abyss, Türk warns

Next in the spotlight was the plight of Sudan’s war-ravaged people who have been subjected to appalling crimes by all parties to the conflict – some possibly constituting war crimes and other atrocity crimes.

Today, more than 600,000 Sudanese “are on the brink of starvation”, said rights chief Volker Türk. “Famine is reported to have taken hold in five areas, including Zamzam displacement camp in North Darfur, where the World Food Programme has just been forced to suspend its lifesaving operations due to intense fighting.”

Another five areas could face famine in the next three months and 17 more are at risk, he said, calling on all Member States to push urgently for a ceasefire and to ease the suffering of the Sudanese people.

Presenting his Office’s annual report on the situation in Sudan, Mr. Türk noted that the armed conflict between rival militaries that erupted in April 2023 following the breakdown in a transfer to civilian rule had generated “the world’s largest humanitarian catastrophe”.

The High Commissioner’s report details myriad violations and abuses committed in Sudan and underscores the need for accountability.

‘Utter impunity’

“We are looking into the abyss. Humanitarian agencies warn that without action to end the war, deliver emergency aid, and get agriculture back on its feet, hundreds of thousands of people could die,” Mr. Türk insisted.

He added that the spiralling situation in Sudan was “the result of grave and flagrant violations of international humanitarian and human rights law, and a culture of utter impunity”.

“As the fighting has spread across the country, appalling levels of sexual violence have followed. More than half of reported rape incidents took the form of gang rape – an indication that sexual violence is being used as a weapon of war,” Mr. Türk explained.

“Sudan is a powder keg, on the verge of a further explosion into chaos,” said the UN’s top human rights official.

Responding on behalf of Sudan, Minister of Justice Moawia Osman Mohamed Khair Mohamed Ahmed, rejected allegations that the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) were responsible for any of the rights violations detailed in the High Commissioner’s report.

Indifferent to suffering

Sudanese civil society representative Hanaa Eltigani described multiple mass killings of civilians attributed to the Rapid Support Forces paramilitaries including in Geneina, their shelling of Zamzan displacement camp in North Darfur and other extreme rights abuses including gang rape and the forced recruitment of children, including South Sudanese refugees.

In addition, the SAF “launched airstrikes and ground assaults, attacking Meneigo and Al-Igibesh villages in West Kordofan, bombing civilian areas in Nyala, South Darfur,” continued Ms Eltigani, Assistant Secretary-General of Youth Citizens Observers Network (YCON), insisting that while the suffering of her country’s people was “met with indifference, the flow of weapons [from abroad] continues unchecked”.

The SAF also carried out executions in Al-Jazira, Ms. Eltigani maintained, “where victims were slaughtered or thrown alive into the Nile”.

Taliban oppression deepens in Afghanistan

Turning to Afghanistan, the Council then heard that the de facto authorities’ oppression and persecution of women, girls and minorities has worsened, with no signs of improvement. 

“Some 23 million people, almost half the population, are in need of humanitarian assistance, a situation drastically worsened by the pauses and cuts to international aid,” said Special Rapporteur on Afghanistan Richard Bennett.

The independent rights expert, who is not a UN staff member, warned that left unchecked, the Taliban was likely to “intensify, expand and further entrench its rights-violating measures on the people of Afghanistan, in particular women and girls and likely religious and ethnic minorities”.

“The lack of a strong, unified response from the international community has already emboldened the Taliban. We owe it to the people of Afghanistan to not embolden them still further through continued inaction.”

The Taliban seized power in 2021 and since then have passed a raft of laws that have severely stifled the freedoms of women and girls.

These include banning women and girls from most classrooms, singing or speaking outside their homes, as well as from travelling without a male guardian.

Institutionalised oppression

Women were also barred from studying medicine in December. Windows in residential buildings have also been banned on the grounds that women could be seen through them.

“Afghanistan is now the epicentre of an institutionalised system of gender-based discrimination, oppression, and domination which amounts to crimes against humanity, including the crime of gender persecution,” Mr. Bennett said, presenting his report. 

Mr. Bennett urged States to ensure that any normalization of diplomatic ties with the Taliban should be dependent on demonstrated improvements in human rights.  

“We must not allow history to repeat itself,” Mr. Bennett said. “Doing so will have catastrophic consequences in and beyond Afghanistan.”

Independent rights experts are not UN staff, receive no salary for their work and are independent of any organisation or government.

Addressing the Human Rights Council in Geneva on conditions inside the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Mr. Türk condemned the Hamas-led terror attacks on Israel that sparked the war in October 2023.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights also said there was no justification for Israel’s devastating military operations in Gaza, which have left more than 48,000 Palestinians dead, according to local authorities.

Search for a better future

“At this tenuous moment the world must ask itself how to resolve this decades old conflict and stop the cycle of violence,” he said.

“Any plans for a better future must deal with the past, so accountability and justice for violations are crucial.”

The High Commissioner added that each phase of the ceasefire must be implemented “in good faith, and in full. All of us must do everything in our power to build on it.”

He said it must be for the Palestinians themselves to determine their own future.

According to news reports, the delayed release by Israel of Palestinian prisoners is expected to go ahead imminently, in exchange for the return of the bodies of four hostages.

‘Unprecedented disregard’

Summing up the “raft of human rights violations” inside the Occupied Palestinian Territory and lack of accountability, he said there had been “an unprecedented disregard” for basic principles of international humanitarian law by both sides since the outbreak of hostilities in October 2023.

Mr. Türk maintained there were serious doubts over Israel’s capacity and will to deliver full accountability, notably in relation to unlawful killings in Gaza and the West Bank.

With Hamas and other Palestinian militants who have taken and tortured hostages, fired indiscriminate projectiles into Israel – amounting to war crimes – there are concerns that they may also have committed serious breaches “including the intentional co-location of military objectives and Palestinian civilians.”

“Any attempts at shaping a peaceful future where such horrors do not recur must ensure that perpetrators are held to account,” said the High Commissioner. 

Impunity when given free rein, harms not only those directly impacted but generations down the line, he contended.

In an apparent response to the outlawing of the UN Palestine refugee relief agency, UNRWA, by Israel and the sanctions against the International Criminal Court by the US earlier this month, the UN rights chief said that “delegitimising and threatening international institutions that are there to serve people and uphold international law also harms us all.”

He also said any attempt to annex Palestinian land or “forced transfer” of civilians must be resisted.

“This is the moment for voices of reason to prevail; for solutions that will deliver justice and make space for compassion, healing and truth telling,” said Mr. Türk.

‘Systemic’ repression in Nicaragua

Investigators tasked by the UN Human Rights Council to track alleged grave abuses of power by top Nicaraguan officials insisted on Wednesday that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) should prosecute what they called the systematic and systemic repression of the country’s people.

The Group of Experts on Nicaragua – who act in an independent capacity and are not UN staff – have previously reported that the Government’s violations appear to constitute crimes against humanity of murder, imprisonment and torture – including rape.

Their latest report will be presented later this week to the Council.

The group maintains that President Daniel Ortega and his wife, Rosario Murillo, have created “an authoritarian State where no independent institutions remain, opposition voices are silenced and the population…faces persecution, forced exile, and economic retaliation”.

Stifling dissent

It was in response to grave concerns about the severe repression of civil rights in Nicaragua that the international community decided in 2018 to establish an investigative body to report back to the Council.

“We call on States to hold Nicaragua accountable for its violations of the UN Convention on Torture and the UN Convention on Statelessness before the International Court of Justice…the international community cannot just bear witness. It needs to take concrete measures,” said Reed Brody, member of the Group of Experts.

“No country in the world has used the arbitrary detention of nationality against political opponents at the same scale that Nicaragua has done; and this is a violation of its obligations under international law under the Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness,” Mr. Brody continued.

‘Machine of repression’

According to the panel’s chair, Jan-Michael Simon, State machinery and the ruling Sandinista party “have virtually fused into a unified machine of repression with domestic and transnational impact.”

This development – which has reduced the judicial, legislative and electoral powers “to mere bodies coordinated by the presidency” – has resulted in myriad deaths, “arbitrary detentions, enforced disappearances, torture, expulsion of nationals, arbitrary deprivation of nationality,” Mr. Simon insisted.