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Thailand’s southern border provinces have lived under emergency rule since 2005, a response to an insurgency that has never fully ended. But the law’s reach, women and rights groups say, has extended well beyond its original targets.
Narathiwat – Zainab was almost home. She had crossed back into Thailand from Malaysia alongside a friend, cleared customs at the Su-ngai Kolok border checkpoint in Narathiwat province, and was about to board the minivan that would take her the rest of the way. Then an official stepped forward and asked to check her documents.
She was separated from her friend without explanation, held for nearly two hours, and told only that soldiers would be coming to take her away.
“I didn’t know what I had done wrong. I thought it was just a document problem, a passport issue. I figured I’d sort it out and be home for dinner. So I didn’t even call my family.”
But she would not be home for dinner. Within hours, she was inside Ingkhayuth Military Camp in Pattani. No warrant had been issued, no charges filed. She would not leave for ten days.
Zainab, 33, who asked to be identified by her first name, is one of a growing number of women caught up in Thailand’s security apparatus under the Emergency Decree of 2005, a law enacted in response to an armed separatist insurgency in the country’s predominantly Malay-Muslim southern provinces, and renewed continuously for more than twenty years.
Civil society groups say the decree, which gives authorities broad powers of detention without charge, is increasingly being applied beyond its original targets, with women accounting for a growing share of those detained or summoned.
What the decree allows
The decree has governed life in Pattani, Yala, Narathiwat and parts of Songkhla since it came into force. It grants security forces authority to impose curfews, ban public assembly, conduct searches without warrants, and detain suspects for up to 30 days in designated facilities outside the regular prison system, including military camps, without filing charges. The conflict it was designed to address has killed more than 7,000 people since 2004 and has never fully subsided.
Officials are granted legal immunity for actions taken in good faith under the law, a provision critics say shields abuses from accountability.
Data compiled by Duay Jai, a civil society group that monitors cases in the region, suggests the decree is reaching beyond its core targets.
Between 2021 and March 2026, at least 13 women were formally detained under security laws. In the same period, at least 41 more were summoned for questioning, a measure that carries significant pressure and that in some cases has tipped into formal detention.The numbers peaked in 2023, when 19 women were summoned. Most were released within 24 hours when no evidence of involvement was found. But some were not.
Ten days without a charge
Zainab’s case began online. According to case records compiled by JASAD, a human rights network active in the region, she was detained on 11 July 2019, on suspicion of violating Thailand’s Computer Crimes Act by sharing a post from a Facebook page called “Suara Patani,” Malay for “The Voice of Patani,” the historical name for the region’s Malay-Muslim homeland.
“I shared it without reading it carefully. I had no idea the content was sensitive or that it could get me in trouble,” Zainab told HaRDstories.
From the checkpoint she was taken to Su-ngai Kolok police station, then transferred to Ingkhayuth Military Camp in Pattani province. Her friend, unwilling to leave her, followed voluntarily.
On the first day, officials brought her to a doctor for a physical examination and asked her to consent to a DNA swab. She initially declined, on the grounds that her case fell under cyber-crimes law rather than security law, but said she felt pressure to comply.
During the ten days that followed, she said, she was not physically harmed. But she found the interrogation difficult to understand.
“They barely asked about what I was accused of. They mostly asked about people in my village, my family, my neighbours.”
She was released when her ten-day detention period expired. No prosecution followed. But returning home brought its own difficulties. She became reluctant to leave the house. Her parents stopped working for months.
“The way people looked at us, like we had done something terrible.”
She also said she felt uncomfortable in a facility where most of the staff were male.
“The hardest part wasn’t what happened to me. It was my family. Everyone was living in fear.”
Held in solitary confinement
When security forces came to Ban Pajo in Yala province in early February 2026, they did not come for one person. Tuanmuminah, 31, who asked that her given name not be used, was one of several family members caught up in the operation within days of each other.
On 2 February, following an explosion inside her family’s home, officials detained her father, her younger brother, and her brother-in-law. DNA samples were taken from women and children in the household. Other family members were summoned for questioning.
Tuanmuminah had already consulted a lawyer and filed an incident report when officials called to ask her to come in. When she arrived, she was told she was being detained immediately. She had no chance to inform her remaining family or collect any personal belongings.
She was then brought to a male doctor for a physical examination and asked to undress. She said the procedure, conducted without prior explanation, conflicted with her religious beliefs. “Women and men are not the same, in body and in feeling.”
She was held in solitary confinement in a military camp for seven days, then transferred to Region 9 Provincial Police Headquarters for a further 25 days. During that time, she said, she was repeatedly pressed to confess.
“When I understood I was being detained, it felt like everything collapsed at once,” Tuanmuminah said. “My children had no one to look after them.”
Her three children went to stay with an aunt. Two of her sisters took on childcare, household expenses, and the cost of travelling to visit her. The children cried frequently, called for their mother, and at times refused to eat. They struggled to follow instructions from the aunt caring for them.
She was later transferred to Yala Provincial Prison without advance notice, she said.
After the case moved into the regular justice system, four family members were formally charged. The Yala Provincial Court set bail at 80,000 baht, roughly 2,400 USD, per person. Tuanmuminah has been released on bail while prosecutors decide whether to bring formal charges against her.
She said the effects of her detention have persisted: difficulty sleeping, loss of appetite, anxiety.
For Tuanmuminah, the detention did not simply make her disappear temporarily. It left a mark on the whole family, she said, one that remained long after she came home.
A complex and fragile situation
Anchana Heemmina, president of Duay Jai, describes the situation facing women in the southern border provinces as “increasingly complex and fragile”, meaning not simply a rise in violent incidents, but the way women are being drawn into the structures of the conflict at multiple levels.
Historically, she said, women here were understood as indirect victims, those left behind when a husband or father was detained. That remains true. But the pattern has shifted. Women are increasingly being summoned, DNA-swabbed, and placed under direct scrutiny, often with no established connection to any incident.
When men are detained, she said, women absorb what remains: childcare, income, communication with lawyers and officials. The economic and psychological burden has grown considerably.
She has also observed behavioural changes in children from affected families, including fear, reluctance to attend school, and social stigma, which she regards as consequences that are slow to reverse.
Security forces have collected DNA from Malay Muslims in the region since 2012, including during house raids and checkpoint stops, often from people with no connection to any incident. The United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination has raised concerns in 2021 about the practice, calling on Thailand to eliminate it.
The expansion of DNA collection and routine summonses, Anchana said, has left many women living with a persistent background anxiety, unsure whether they might be called in at any moment regardless of their actual involvement in anything.
Abdullah Ngo of JASAD said civil society groups and international bodies, including the United Nations, have argued for years that the Emergency Decree needs to be significantly revised. In July 2024, the International Commission of Jurists stated that key provisions of the law do not comply with Thailand’s human rights obligations and called for it to be repealed or substantially amended. A UN Working Group that visited Thailand in December 2024 documented that women in the southern border provinces had experienced arbitrary arrest, interrogation and forced DNA collection, and called on the government to cease those practices.
Thai authorities have consistently maintained that the decree remains necessary given the persistent threat of violence in the region. The decree has been extended repeatedly since 2005.
JASAD’s particular concern regarding women is the mismatch between military detention facilities, predominantly male environments, and the religious and cultural norms of the region’s Muslim communities. Women detainees, JASAD says, are typically interrogated by male officials and have no right under current practice to have a trusted person present.
The organisation argues that using special laws against women erodes trust between the state and the community, and risks undermining the conditions that any peace process needs to survive.
The need for genuine participation
In February, Thailand launched its first National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security, developed in partnership with UN Women and civil society groups. Anchana welcomes the framework but said it falls short in practice. The plan lists women’s participation in peace processes as an intended outcome, she said, but makes no strategic effort to bring women into decision-making at the level of formal peace talks.
What is missing, she said, is not language on paper but real space for women, particularly women from the Deep South, to exercise power and play a genuine role in building peace in the region.
Amanee Doloh, president of the Patani Women’s Organisation (PERWANI), said the Emergency Decree has created conditions that go beyond any single case. The ability of security forces to cordon off areas, conduct searches, and make arrests at night has left many women feeling unsafe even at home.
“Many women are living with fear even in the place that should be the safest, their own home.”
The toll, she said, is visible in daily life across a region that has been living with conflict for more than twenty years, in mental health, in family stability, in the ability of people to move through the world without fear.
Amanee said that as long as the laws remain in force, fear will remain part of everyday life for women and their families across the region.
This story is part of a collaborative reporting project between HaRDstories and Wartani, supported by the Canada Fund for Local Initiatives.
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