Thailand

The Alternatives to Child Detention Peer Learning Platform brings decision-makers together to improve humanitarian settlement for children across the Indo-Pacific region.
The Alternatives to Child Detention Peer Learning Platform is an informal regional grouping of policy and implementing agencies within the governments of Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, New Zealand and Thailand, as well as civil society and international organisations focused on advancing practical progress towards alternatives to detention in the region.

This policy adopts a whole-of-government and whole-of-society approach, including joint sustained collaborations between government, CSOs, UN, leaders with lived experience, and youth leaders. The implementation and evaluation of the Thailand Alternatives to Detention (ATD) MOU have resulted in many children and families being released from detention and avenues for release from detention.

This report presents the findings of a comprehensive study on immigration detention and alternatives to detention (ATD) across 19 countries within the five sub-regions of the Asia-Pacific: East and Northeast Asia, Southeast Asia, South and Southwest Asia, North and Central Asia, and the Pacific. Across the Asia-Pacific region, there is widespread use of arbitrary immigration detention, used as a de facto measure without safeguards in place to ensure that it is reasonable, necessary, and proportionate in the individual case.

On 6 September 2022, the Thailand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Organization for Migration (IOM) Thailand co-hosted the inaugural Training on Migration Reporting at Pullman Bangkok King Power.  

The event was a capacity building exercise to support media professionals on their coverage of migration issues, and to equip them with background information on the regional and national situation, government policy, and related human rights frameworks, to strengthen their role in combating misinformation and negative stereotypes of migrants.  

Thailand said it would allow undocumented migrant workers from Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar to work in the country legally for about two years to curb the spread of COVID-19.

Migrants have to sign up online and be registered by an employer before mid-September in order to receive a work permit until February 2023, according to a resolution by the cabinet.

The Declaration aims at enhacing the well-being and protection of the migrant fishersabd at strengthening mesasures to enhance the labour conditions of migrant fishers and ensure their labour rights prrotection. 

The Declaration recognises the need to provide humanitarian assistance to all migrants and their family members—regardless of their legal status— during crisis situations. It encourages the ASEAN Member States to include migrant workers and their families in all stages of crisis management and ensure they have access to continuing support.

The adoption of the ASEAN Declaration on Portability of Social Security Benefits for Migrant Workers in ASEAN is the realisation of the ASEAN Leaders’ commitments made in the 2007 Cebu Declaration and the 2017 ASEAN Consensus on the Protection and Promotion of the Rights of Migrant Workers. It also reflects the concerted efforts of the Member States to transform ASEAN into a community that is people-centred, inclusive, sustainable, resilient, and dynamic as stated in the ASEAN 2025 Vision.

The Project is conceived in response to various facets of labour migration, fair and ethical recruitment and sustainable reintegration, gaps and challenges relating to safe, orderly and regular labour migration and improved skills recognition, in the corridors between South and South-East Asia and the Middle East. The project is designed on the first phase of the SDC supported regional project, ìStrengthening Labour Migration Governance through Regional Cooperation in Colombo Process Countriesî.

Thailand’s National Screening Mechanism (NSM) will be established to screen those who have protection claims in Thailand and grant a 'protected person status' to eligible applicants which in theory would protect them from arbitrary detention. However, many details remain unclear, including what protections persons with ‘protected person status’ will be able to access, and whether they will be protected from detention in practice. Discussions are ongoing for how this will be implemented.