BEIJING -- The Chinese government confirmed it has repatriated and detained two dissidents who were living in Thailand and had won UN recognition as refugees, a state-run newspaper reported.
Thai police handed over the two Chinese men -- Jiang Yefei and Dong Guanping -- to Chinese police this month, although the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees had arranged for their resettlement to another country, human rights groups said last week.
Until Thursday, the Chinese government had been silent about the case, and the circumstances of the men were unclear. But Chinese public security officials told Procuratorial Daily, an official newspaper for legal affairs, that Mr Jiang and Mr Dong had been detained on illegal migration charges.
"Based on a cooperative mechanism between Chinese and Thai police, the Thai police followed the law and handed the two men over to the Chinese police on Nov 13," the report said, citing the public security authorities.
The men had confessed to wrongdoing, the report said. It made no mention of whether the men had access to lawyers or independent legal advice.
The Chinese government's confirmation that it had worked with Thailand to send back the men is likely to harden criticism from human rights groups and Western governments who have accused Beijing of taking increasingly aggressive steps to stop citizens fleeing China, and to spirit them back if they do.
Last month, the Chinese police worked with forces in a border town in Myanmar to repatriate the teenage son of a detained Chinese human rights lawyer who was fleeing after he was blocked from leaving China on a student visa. Two men accompanying the boy were also detained.
In July, Thailand sent back to China about 100 members of the Uighur ethnic minority who had fled there, prompting criticism from advocates and the UN refugee agency.
Before he went to Thailand in 2008, Mr Jiang had been twice detained by the Chinese police for criticising the government's handling of an immense earthquake that year in his home province, Sichuan, in the southwest.
Mr Dong, from Zhengzhou, a city in central China, went to Thailand in September. He had been jailed from 2001 to 2004 on charges of "inciting subversion of state power" and detained for several months beginning in 2014 for publicly commemorating people who were killed during the military crackdown on pro-democracy protests across China in 1989.
But according to the Chinese police, both men were common crime suspects. Officials have accused them of organising other Chinese people to leave the country illegally through an overland route into Thailand.
Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha said his government was applying the law when it sent the two back to China.
"They violated immigration law and after checking, we found that there was an arrest warrant from the source country," Gen Prayut said this week to reporters. "They asked us to send them back, and we had to send according to procedure."
Both men had been given permission to resettle in Canada, where their families flew last week after the men were sent back to China.