Thailand is apparently considering a sequel to last year's forced deportation of 40 Uyghur men to China, with two more Uyghurs now facing the same fate. Activists warn that sending them back would put their lives in grave danger, and one of the men has a succinct summary of the situation: he would be "like a slave" in China.

Last year's mass deportation went ahead despite pleas from the men themselves and the UN. The US and Canada had reportedly offered to resettle them, but Bangkok appeared more interested in not upsetting Beijing. The UN has since said the whereabouts of the returnees remain unknown - a diplomatic way of saying nobody knows what happened to them.

The two men currently at risk were recently transferred to an immigration detention centre, which human rights groups note is the traditional prelude to Thailand once again giving in to pressure from Beijing. One of the men, whose name is being withheld for security reasons, told his girlfriend he wanted to go "anywhere else but China."

Elaine Pearson, Asia director at Human Rights Watch, called for the men to be allowed to travel to a safe third country. "Previous Thai governments have kept Uyghurs in inhumane detention for years and then complied with Beijing's demands to send them to China, where they were forcibly disappeared," she said - a sentence that manages to be both a description of policy and an indictment of it.

The two men had been serving a seven-year prison sentence for offences related to an attempted escape from immigration detention in January 2020. They were part of a group of more than 200 Uyghur men, women and children apprehended by Thai police in 2014 near the border with Malaysia after they fled from China. Since 2014, the women and children in the group have been released to Turkey, while the men have been deported to China in separate batches - a policy that has attracted criticism from the United Nations and US secretary of state Marco Rubio.

Uyghurs, a Turkic minority mainly from the Xinjiang region, have endured decades of oppressive and discriminatory treatment from Chinese authorities, including the incarceration of hundreds of thousands of people in detention camps aimed at stamping out their cultural identity. Beijing defends its policies in Xinjiang as poverty alleviation and counter-terrorism, a description that has yet to convince the UN, which has condemned the crackdown as a potential crime against humanity.

In July, Marzeyya Kasem's boyfriend - she asked to be referred to by her Islamic alias - wrote to her in a letter that he would be "like a slave" if sent back to China. "Sometimes I thought why I'm a human being. What I do wrong against China … no want to go back to China," he wrote. She shared the letter with a Thai rights group.

The two men facing imminent deportation reportedly pleaded their case to Thailand's office of the National Human Rights Commission on Wednesday. Relatives of Uyghurs have said the Chinese government was "paranoid about Uyghurs going to a safe country in large numbers and living together," and preferred to have them deported.

It is not clear whether China has issued a formal extradition request for the two men. But Chaipruak Doungprapat, Thailand's national security council chief, told reporters that the men, along with three other Uyghurs still in prison, had arrest warrants outstanding in China. Some have questioned whether those warrants could be credible, considering that at least one of them - Kasem's boyfriend - was a minor when he left China. "If they are really wanted for a crime in China, why didn't China immediately issue a [Interpol] red notice [when they were detained in 2014]?" asked Kasem. She believes that because Thailand was criticised for last year's mass deportation, authorities are now trying to establish a more credible legal basis for the move.

A spokesperson for China's foreign affairs ministry said: "The cooperation between China and Thailand in combating cross-border illegal and criminal activities such as smuggling is consistent with the laws of the two countries, international law and international practice." A spokesperson for Thailand's foreign affairs ministry declined to comment - which, in diplomatic terms, is often the loudest thing anyone says.