Thailand on Saturday confirmed it would release a group of almost a hundred Pakistani refugees and asylum seekers that activists said includes several dozen children and a baby born in detention. In total 96 people, most of whom were arrested in December, will be released from a Bangkok detention centre on Monday, an immigration officer said.
The detained group are from Pakistan's Ahmadi Muslim community, who suffer violence and persecution in their home country, according to the Thai Committee for Refugees, which helped organise the release. Veerawit Tianchainan, the organisation's executive director, said there were 34 children under 12 among those detained in cramped rooms that he said were filled with up to 150 people despite being designed to hold just 40 inmates.
He said one baby was born inside the facility and described conditions as "unhygienic and very crowded". "Children were separated from their mothers or fathers and that kind of condition, psychologically, is very very bad," he said, explaining that families were split up because men and women are held apart.