The Immigration Department of Malaysia said Tuesday that it has deported 1,086 “illegal” immigrants from Myanmar. The immigrants were deported through the RMN Lumut Base in Perak on 3 Myanmar Navy ships with cooperation from the Myanmar Embassy and the Royal Malaysian Navy.

The government carried out the deportation despite a court order by the Kuala Lumpur High Court placing an interim stay to halt the same pending judicial review. The case was filed on Monday by human rights groups Amnesty International Malaysia and Asylum Access, which expressed concern over the risk to lives of the immigrants being deported in times of a military coup in Myanmar. Many of the immigrants in Malaysia come from ethnic minority groups who have fled conflict and military crackdown in Malaysia.

As put by Katrina Jorena Maliamauv, the Executive Director of Amnesty International Malaysia, “the Malaysian government is recklessly imperilling the lives of over 1,000 Myanmar people by deporting them under a curtain of secrecy to a country in the middle of a coup marred by human rights violations.”

Although Kairul Dzaimee Daud, Malaysia’s immigration chief, has said that “all detainees deported are illegal immigrants and “do not involve Rohingya or asylum seekers,” the court filing by Amnesty International Malaysia and Asylum Access included the names and details of 3 UNHCR document holders. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNCHR) had expressed concern that there may be others similarly placed in the group of 1200 that the government had planned to deport.

Further, the court filing included 17 minors who have at least one parent still in Malaysia, and separating them from their parents is violative of the country’s Child Act of 2001 as well as its international commitments under Article 9 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

In response to the Tuesday deportation, Maliamauv has said:

The Malaysian government’s decision to deport people in defiance of an order from the High Court today was inhumane and devastating. We believed that with a court order those due to be deported would be safe, and so we are shocked that the government went ahead with the deportation. … It appears the authorities railroaded this shockingly cruel deportation before any proper scrutiny of the decision, and in spite of week-long calls for a proper assessment of the people on the list.

Refugees in Malaysia are generally at risk because the country is neither a signatory to the UN Convention on Refugees nor has a domestic administrative framework to govern the rights of refugees. Further, the UNCHR has been denied proper access to refugee detention facilities since August 2019. Nevertheless, as has also been highlighted by the rights groups, forced deportation of asylum-seekers violates the customary international principle of non-refoulment which Malaysia is obligated to follow.

The Kuala Lampur court will continue to hear the case on Wednesday and the groups expect that it will “reveal answers” regarding the secret manner in which the deportation was carried out.