By John Quinley

The tea house buzzed with life, tucked within the sprawling Rohingya refugee camps of Bangladesh. Over cups of Myanmar-style milk tea, residents gathered to exchange news and stories of survival. It was here in 2019 that I first met Mohammad Arfat, an outspoken and determined Rohingya human rights defender and refugee.

Mohammad Arfat was deeply connected to the refugee communities in both India and Bangladesh—he had lived in both places. He immediately supported our work at Fortify Rights, helping us meet with newly arrived refugees and document serious abuses.  We met Rohingya refugees who shared credible accounts of beatings, threats, systemic harassment, and arbitrary detention by Indian authorities—experiences that ultimately forced them to flee.

After our first meeting in 2019, Mohammed Arfat became not just a trusted human rights defender but a friend. He is humble, quick to smile, and deeply committed to serving his people, despite the immense challenges he faces as both a refugee and a genocide survivor.

A year after the meeting, after being threatened in refugee camps because of his human rights work, Mohammad Arfat left Bangladesh to return to India, where he had previously lived as a refugee. Shortly after his return, in December 2020, Indian authorities arrested him in Assam State, physically assaulted him, and convicted him of immigration-related offences, even though he was a registered refugee with the U.N. Refugee Agency in India.

He served his sentence, but after the completion of the sentence, Indian authorities continued to detain him—arbitrarily and indefinitely—in a series of detention facilities across the country for more than four years. 

He should never have been detained. 

Even during his detention, he continued his human rights work, advocating for his fellow Rohingya detainees to be freed. “I pleaded with them [the Indian jail authorities] to release me and other Rohingya refugees. I continued to try to help my community,” Mohammad Arfat told me after his release.

This story was originally published in maktoobmedia.com. Read the full story here.