A group of ethnic Rohingya left on a Thai island after a dangerous boat journey from Bangladesh should be given help and the opportunity to determine if they are refugees, Human Rights Watch said Tuesday.
The mostly Muslim Rohingya have long been persecuted in Myanmar. More than 700,000 fled to neighboring Bangladesh in 2017 to escape a military counterinsurgency campaign that the U.S. and others have called genocide. Since then, Rohingya have attempted to leave both Myanmar and Bangladesh on perilous sea journeys to Malaysia, a Muslim-majority country relatively lenient to arriving migrants.
