Photo: An illegal ethnic Hmong refugee mother from Laos waits for medical treatment for her child Monday, Feb. 5, 2007, at a shelter in Huay Nam Khao, Thailand. More than 8,000 Laos Hmong are living at the shelter. (AP Photo/David Longstreath)
Thai authorities have sent 31 ethnic minority Hmong back to Laos, officials said Sunday, as debate continued over the treatment of the group which claims to be persecuted in their home country.
Piriya Khempon, deputy spokesman at the Thai foreign affairs ministry, said that the 31 members of the Hmong hill tribe had illegally entered the kingdom two weeks ago, and were sent home on Friday.
"Thailand followed the process based on the kingdom's law," he told AFP. "It is the issue of illegal entry."
Piriya did not say whether there were any children in the group, or where in Thailand the Hmong had entered the country.
The Thai government insists that the Hmong are economic migrants and that it has the right to repatriate them, but many human rights groups and the Hmong themselves say they are persecuted in communist Laos.
The scattered groups of Hmong, a highland people, are former fighters and descendants of a CIA-funded "secret army" which from the early 1960s fought communist Pathet Lao forces when the Vietnam War spilled into Laos.
Human rights group Amnesty International said in a report last week that Laotian authorities had attacked groups of Hmong, while it accused Thailand of forcibly repatriating refugees of the hill tribe.
Thailand tried to forcibly returned some 153 Hmong with UN refugee status in January, but eventually backed down after they barricaded themselves inside a detention centre and threatened to commit suicide.
The UN refugee agency has been denied access to about 7,000 Hmong who live in a camp in Thailand's northern Phetchabun province, and has urged the Thai government to let it assess whether any of them are genuine refugees.
