Australia to 'consider' Saudi woman's asylum plea

The Australian government said it had asked Thailand and the UNHCR to process Qunun’s claim quickly, and it would consider her application for a humanitarian visa once the UNHCR had made its decision.

Qunun said she planned to seek asylum in Australia, fearing she would be killed if sent back by Thai immigration officials who stopped her at the airport on Sunday.

Saudi Arabia's human rights record has been under heavy scrutiny since the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi last year.

Initially, Thai authorities said Qunun would be sent back to Saudi Arabia.

But as her plight pinballed across social media - including tweets about how she had barricaded herself in a hotel room - they abruptly changed course and allowed her to leave the airport Monday in the care of the UN's refugee agency.

The UNHCR said it was "very grateful" officials did not send Qunun back against her will.

"It could take several days to process the case and determine next steps," the UNHCR representative in Thailand, Giuseppe de Vicentiis, said in a statement.

Thailand is not a signatory to a UN convention on refugees, and asylum seekers are typically deported or wait years to be resettled in third countries.

The UNHCR insists anyone with an asylum claim should not be sent back to the country they fled under the principle of non-refoulement.

In a short press release distributed to media outside their embassy in Bangkok on Tuesday, the Saudi government said it had not demanded her deportation, adding the case is a "family affair", but under the "care and attention" of the embassy.

Qunun has said she believes she will be imprisoned or killed if sent back, and that her family is so strict it once locked her in a room for six months for cutting her hair.

The father of an 18-year-old Saudi woman asylum seeker who fled to Thailand saying she feared her family would kill her, has arrived in Bangkok and wants to meet his daughter, Thailand’s immigration chief said on Tuesday.

But Rahaf Mohammed al-Qunun’s father and brother would have to wait and see whether the U.N. refugee agency would allow them to see her, immigration chief Surachate Hakpan said.

“The father and brother want to go and talk to Rahaf but the U.N. will need to approve such talk,” Surachate told reporters.

“The father is now here in Thailand and that’s a source of concern,” Phil Robertson, Human Rights Watch’s deputy director for Asia, told Reuters.

“We have no idea what he is going to do ... whether he will try to find out where she is and go harass her. We don’t know whether he is going to try to get the embassy to do that.” 

Under the hashtag #SaveRahaf, the young woman's desperate pleas became a social media sensation, and she was able to post live updates and videos from the Bangkok airport in both Arabic and English, racking up more than 80,000 followers.