Bhutan’s life sentences for political prisoners violate international law, UN says

Bhutan is illegally jailing people for life without the possibility of parole simply for expressing political opinions, according to a damning United Nations report published this week.

The report’s conclusions sparked renewed criticism from human rights advocates, former prisoners and exiled Bhutanese, who said the arrests reflected a broader pattern of discrimination against the kingdom’s ethnic Nepali minority.

The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention found the Bhutanese government had infringed upon human-rights practices by arresting ethnic Nepali Bhutanese and placing them outside the protection of law. It added the kingdom had violated the prisoners’ right to a fair trial, calling the detentions “discriminatory”.

“[They were] deprived of their liberty on discriminatory grounds, because of their political opinion and status as members of a linguistic minority,” the report said, referring to the arrests of three men – Birkha Bahadur Chhetri, Kumar Gautam and Sunman Gurung – in 2008.

Bhutan started expelling its ethnic Nepali population known as Lhotshampas – meaning the “southern borderlanders” – in the late 1980s up to the 1990s.

Citing its “one nation, one people” policy, it threw out more than 100,000. They were forced to live in refugee camps in neighbouring Nepal before the majority were resettled in other countries between 2007 and 2016.