UN urges Thailand to suspend Hmong deportations

GENEVA, June 12 (Reuters) The United Nations today urged Thailand to halt further deportations of ethnic Hmong to communist-run Laos until their claims for refugee status are individually assessed.

Spokeswoman Jennifer Pagonis said the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) was troubled by the deportation of 161 Hmong over the weekend, noting that authorities ought to conduct screening interviews before repatriating any more of the 8,000 Hmong living in a makeshift northern Thailand camp.

''We would very much like to see deportations put on hold until this screening mechanism is put in place,'' she told a news briefing in Geneva.

The Hmong fear they will be tortured in Laos because their relatives backed the United States in the Vietnam war which ended in 1975.

The UNHCR says that people who may be persecuted on political or religious grounds if sent back to their homeland deserve international refugee status.

Last week US agents in California arrested former Hmong chief Vang Pao -- who ran a CIA-trained, anti-communist guerrilla army in Laos during the war -- for plotting to overthrow the current Vientiane government.

The arrest and deportations have fanned Hmong concerns that US and Thai patience had run out for ''America's Forgotten Allies,'' who say they are still having to pay for their people's Cold War allegiances.

Reuters RKM GC1752