KUALA LUMPUR, May 20 — The Human Rights Commission of Malaysia (Suhakam) has once again urged authorities to lift the ban on human rights parties who are currently not allowed to meet with migrants and refugees detained at temporary detention centres.

From a dialogue with several agencies including the National Security Council (NSC), Suhakam commissioner Jerald Joseph said the authorities are at the moment working on updating certain policies in relation to United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) procedures.

“We have not gotten a formal response [from the Home Ministry], but from our dialogue with several agencies, we had a dialogue with NSC.

“From what we were made to understand, there is a policy being updated or being worked on,  to ascertain the Malaysian policy for verification of asylum seekers to be in synch with the UNHCR procedure,” Jerald told reporters during an online press conference today. 

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While Suhakam supports this move, Jerald said this should not be made a reason to disallow UNHCR to meet with refugees who are currently detained in detention centres.

“It is a good thing we support it, most countries have that, but I think it’s taken too long. I don’t think you need to suspend UNHCR while getting ready that policy. 

“If can do both in tandem, and when that comes into force, then you can use that new criteria of working together with state policy and UNHCR.

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“But as it is now, all we know, the ban is still on, and that should not happen because it is a little bit illogical to not bringing out refugees like the Rohingyas,” he said.

On April 14, 2020, Suhakam had written to the Home Ministry to seek an explanation as to why human rights non-governmental organisations were banned from the detention centre grounds, disallowing their visit to refugees who were detained.

By November 2020, the UNHCR still were not allowed it to meet detained refugees and asylum seekers.

This would be for more than a year as the country cracks down on undocumented migrants, raising concerns over the status of vulnerable people.

The UNHCR previously visited the centres in order to determine who should be given refugee status and allowed to leave, but Malaysia’s government has toughened its stance on immigration this year.

Suhakam today also questioned the need of the authorities to keep the refugees detained, as clearly this group cannot be deported.

“If they are running away from their situation of war, criminality and danger, we should not be sending them back. Even if we have not ratified the refugee convention, that is an international law principle for anyone.

“We cannot send them back,” Jerald said.

Malaysia is home to millions of undocumented foreigners and over 100,000 Rohingya refugees fleeing persecution in Myanmar and from camps in Bangladesh. Although Malaysia does not recognise refugees, it allows free movement to those given protection by the UNHCR.

The agency was able to register 6,039 individuals as asylum seekers by October 2020 compared with 27,323 through all of 2019, the agency said. Among those it had not been able to see were hundreds of Rohingya arrested after months at sea.

* Editor's note: An earlier version of this article contained an error on the number of asylum seekers the UNHCR was able to register by 2020 and has since been amended.