Bangkok is a city celebrated for its beauty and tradition, and also one notorious for a nefarious underbelly, driven largely by the same tourist market that buttresses the Thai economy. It’s an unfair reputation that has ignored or quickly forgotten the human lives that stay there, beneath the gloss and grit filtered into movies and documentaries, among the outskirts. The first part of this series covered the lives of Christians, who fled persecution in Pakistan, and are staying in Thailand …
Bangkok’s little-known population of Pakistani asylum seekers uses community action to respond to the challenges facing refugees without a camp. In an unremarkable concrete apartment block on the outskirts of Bangkok, over 100 families from Pakistan wait.
BANGKOK: Almost 100 Pakistani refugees have been freed from Bangkok’s overcrowded immigration prison in an initiative spearheaded by Thai human rights activists. The Thai Committee for Refugees said the release on bail of 96 members of Pakistan’s Ahmadiyya Muslim sect was the first such large-scale release of refugees who Thai authorities locked up merely for being refugees. The group negotiated the release with the state National Human Rights Commission and immigration officials. The detainees, about a third of whom are …