Mizzima-Sept 3
The Malaysian government should halt plans to forcibly return approximately 1,500 Myanmar nationals on September 29, 2026, Fortify Rights said 2 September. Returning refugees to Myanmar would risk exposing them to torture, persecution, armed conflict, forced recruitment, and other serious rights violations, the NGO said. On August 27, 2026, Malaysia’s Home Ministry announced that it had finalized the first phase of a program to return 5,000 Myanmar detainees from its immigration detention centers. The first 1,476 people are scheduled to depart Malaysia on September 29 aboard two Myanmar Navy warships and a hospital ship. This follows a July 23 announcement by the deputy foreign minister, who told Parliament that the planned returns were intended to ease what he described as the burden on Malaysia. “[Malaysia is] not a signatory to the [1951 Refugee] Convention,” he said, “and the public has now begun to feel burdened by issues relating to the management of the Rohingya community.” Malaysia has seen a sharp rise in public anti-Rohingya sentiment and incitement in recent months. Separately, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim also declared that Myanmar’s military junta had agreed to accept 5,000 detainees from Malaysia, citing the two governments’ “good bilateral relations,” in an election campaign speech on July 29. In the most recent announcement, the Home Ministry disclosed that 4,008 people, primarily ethnic Rohingya from Myanmar, would be processed through the government’s Dokumen Pendaftaran Pelarian (DPP, or Refugee Registration Document) procedures. At the same time, a separate group of 5,000 detainees would undergo “voluntary repatriation” without undergoing the DPP process. The ministry has not disclosed the ethnicities of the first 1,476 people of this group of 5,000 who are being expelled. The government first announced the DPP in July 2025 and began implementing it in the detention center in January 2026. The government has promised that DPP-registered refugees will be able to remain and have lawful access to education, work rights, and other basic services. However, the DPP program has experienced a slow, limited rollout. Although the government had collected data from 4,010 detainees under the first phase of the DPP, it had only formally recognized 78 Rohingya as refugees under the program as of June 2026, according to a parliamentary reply by the Home Minister. The authorities have said that processing the nearly 220,000 refugees and asylum seekers registered with the U.N. Refugee Agency (UNHCR) could continue until 2029. Read more at:
