NEW YORK: Asean countries should focus on saving the lives of the Rohingya and Bangladeshi migrants because pushing them back to sea after giving them provisions is incomprehensible and inhumane, said the United Nations as it urged governments in the region to take swift action to protect the migrants’ lives.

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein said he was appalled at reports that Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia had been pushing boats full of migrants back out to sea, which he added would inevitably lead to many avoidable deaths.

“The focus should be on saving lives, not further endangering them,” he said, adding that news that a boat carrying several hundred people in abject condition had been given provisions and then pushed back out to sea by the Thai navy last Thursday was “incomprehensible and inhumane”.

Zeid also expressed alarm that countries in the region were threatening to criminalise vulnerable migrants and asylum seekers who had crossed the borders.

“Governments in Southeast Asia need to respond to this crisis on the premise that migrants — regardless of their legal status, how they arrive at borders, or where they come from — are people with rights that must be upheld,” he said in a statement.

Zeid said the number of people leaving Myanmar and Bangladesh by boat last year was estimated to have climbed to around 53,000.

Some 920 migrants, he added, are known to have perished in the Bay of Bengal between September 2014 and March this year. — The Malaysian Insider

This article first appeared in The Edge Financial Daily, on May 19, 2015.