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KUALA LUMPUR: The United Nations refugee agency said Malaysia has not allowed it to meet with refugees and asylum-seekers in detention for more than a year as the country cracks down on undocumented migrants, raising concerns about the status of vulnerable people.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) previously visited the centers to determine who should be granted refugee status and who should be allowed to leave, but Putrajaya has hardened his stance on immigration this year.
Thousands of undocumented foreigners have been detained in what authorities say are efforts to stop the spread of Covid-19, and the state-funded National Human Rights Commission said it was concerned about overcrowding in the jails.
The Immigration Department, which runs the detention centers, did not respond to requests for comment. The Interior Ministry did not have an immediate comment.
UNHCR told Reuters today that it had not been allowed to visit the centers since August 2019. It did not say why, citing ongoing discussions.
“Unfortunately, this has prevented UNHCR from seeing persons of concern detained to determine who needs international protection and to advocate for their release,” UNHCR told Reuters in comments emailed today.
“We are aware and concerned that several persons of concern, including vulnerable persons, who require our attention remain in detention.”
Malaysia is home to millions of undocumented foreigners and more than 100,000 Rohingya refugees fleeing persecution in Myanmar and camps in Bangladesh. Although Malaysia does not recognize refugees, it allows free movement to those who receive UNHCR protection.
The agency was able to register 6,039 people as asylum seekers in October this year compared to 27,323 for all of 2019, the agency said. Among those he had not been able to see were hundreds of Rohingya arrested after months at sea.
“Refugees and asylum seekers like the Rohingya do not have a chance to be released without UNHCR,” said Jerald Joseph, commissioner of the National Human Rights Commission.
Joseph estimated that more than 1,000 asylum seekers were in detention camps, which he believed now housed a third more people than the 12,500 for which they had been built. The others in the jails are undocumented foreigners waiting to be deported.
Outbreaks of Covid-19 have been reported in at least five of the detention centers and more than 1,000 have been affected in these groups.
Human rights groups and detainees have said that conditions in the detention camps were brutal.
Last month, the Indonesian Sovereign Coalition of Migrant Workers quoted former detainees as saying they had been treated like animals and doused with disinfectant after a Covid-19 outbreak.
A former detainee, an Indonesian woman who was released in January, told Reuters that hundreds of detainees were crammed into a room, including the elderly, pregnant and sick women and children. The food was inadequate and an official beat the detainees, he added.
“It was as if all the detainees in the immigration detention center were not human,” he said.
Authorities have recognized in the past that conditions in migrant detention centers could be improved.
