The Hague, The Netherlands: Bhutan Watch, a leading exile based Bhutanese think tank, has released its most extensive and urgent human rights report to date, titled The 2025 Human Rights Report on Bhutan. The report paints a sobering picture of a country increasingly retreating from democratic norms while sustaining a façade of peace and stability. Behind Bhutan’s celebrated global image lies a reality of systematic repression, ethnic discrimination, forced deportations, and growing authoritarianism.
The report is based on survivor testimonies, satellite research, UN documentation, and field reports. It details a range of grave abuses that persist under the current Bhutanese regime—including arbitrary imprisonment, enforced disappearances, the denial of press freedom, and the continued disenfranchisement of tens of thousands of ethnic Nepali Bhutanese (Lhotshampas).
At least 35 political prisoners remain detained in Bhutanese prisons, some for over three decades. Many were arrested in the early 1990s for advocating democracy, minority rights, and freedom of expression. These detainees were never granted fair trials, and many were convicted under the vaguely defined National Security Act. Prisoners continue to be denied access to independent legal counsel, medical care, and family visits. The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (WGAD) has declared these detentions illegal under international law and called for their immediate release and reparations.
Forced deportations after decades of incarceration is another aspect exposed by the report.
Two of Bhutan’s longest-held political prisoners, Ram Bahadur Rai and Madhukar Monger, were released in 2023 and 2024 after 30 and 32 years of imprisonment. Rather than being allowed to return to their communities, they were forcibly deported to Nepal—despite being born in Bhutan and holding no legal status elsewhere. Their deportation violates core principles of international human rights law, including the right to nationality, the prohibition on arbitrary exile, and the right to return to one’s country.
Though this report remains silent on the issue of enforced disappearances and total silence because it covered issues occurring in 2023-2024 there is a huge alarm over the disappearance of Bhutanese human rights defenders, including Loknath Acharya, Bom Bahadur Tiwari, and several others who were arrested by the Royal Bhutan Police. Despite formal requests from the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, the Bhutanese government has failed to disclose any information regarding their whereabouts, legal status, or welfare. This constitutes a serious violation of the Convention Against Torture and the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance.
One of the most urgent findings in the report is the complete lack of independent monitoring of Bhutan’s detention facilities. Bhutan has not allowed any external inspection of its prisons since 2019. Prior access was extremely limited and tightly controlled. Detainees have reported being instructed to provide only positive comments to visiting monitors and threatened with harsh treatment if they spoke the truth. Foreign monitors were often denied confidential interviews with prisoners, rendering oversight ineffective.
There are no domestic human rights organizations nor an independent national human rights commission in Bhutan that are permitted to advocate for detainees or monitor prison conditions. The UN WGAD has urged Bhutan to implement legal protections for detainees and to allow independent oversight—but the government has made no progress. This failure raises serious questions about Bhutan’s commitment to international human rights norms.
The country’s global press freedom ranking has plummeted over the last four years: from 33rd in 2022, to 90th in 2023, 147th in 2024, and now 152nd in 2025 (Reporters Without Borders). This rapid decline reflects worsening conditions for journalists and media organizations, including criminal defamation laws, withdrawal of government advertising, editorial pressure from political elites, and the dissolution of the Bhutan Media Council in 2023, which removed all independent oversight. Self-censorship is widespread, and critical voices are increasingly silenced.
Bhutan’s longstanding ethnic discrimination continues. Thousands of Lhotshampas, Bhutanese citizens of Nepali origin, remain stateless inside Bhutan, decades after mass expulsions in the 1990s. Despite living in the country for generations, they are denied citizenship, land ownership, the right to vote, access to education, and public employment. There is no legal or administrative mechanism in place for resolving their status, and Bhutan has refused all international calls for restitution or repatriation of displaced families.
The Bhutanese refugee crisis remains one of the region’s most overlooked humanitarian failures. Over 90,000 Bhutanese refugees resettled abroad, with over 7000 still confined to two camps in eastern Nepal. Bhutan has categorically rejected all offers for third-party negotiations and continues to block any UN-led solution. The resulting statelessness has left thousands of refugee youth vulnerable to poverty, depression, exploitation, and trafficking.
The report draws attention to the Gelephu Mindfulness City (GMC) project, a major government-backed urban development launched in 2023. The city is being built on land formerly occupied and cultivated by displaced Lhotshampa families who were forcibly evicted in the 1990s. The project was announced without any public consultation or land restitution, making it a symbolic example of how the state is rewriting historical injustices through exclusionary development.
Bhutan continues to ban peaceful protest, and the registration of independent civil society organizations is tightly controlled. There are no legal protections for trade unions or collective bargaining. Labour rights remain unprotected, and youth migration is surging—with over 5,000 Bhutanese leaving the country each month in search of work and freedom.
Rejection of UN Recommendations
At Bhutan’s Universal Periodic Review (UPR) in 2024, the government rejected 68 of 203 recommendations, including: Ratifying the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), releasing political prisoners and disclosing disappeared activists, allowing independent prison monitoring, protecting press freedom and civil society, recognising the rights of stateless persons and minorities and constituting independent national human rights commission as per Paris principle.
Bhutan’s resistance to accountability reflects a deeper refusal to engage with the international human rights system or accept global standards for transparency, dignity, and justice.
Bhutan Watch has offered key recommendations in the report which includes immediately releasing all political prisoners and disclose the status of disappeared detainees, repatriation of all the willing Bhutanese refugees in the camps in Nepal, allowing full, independent monitoring of all detention facilities, ending forced deportations and restore the right of return to exiled Bhutanese, recognising and grant citizenship to stateless Lhotshampa communities, suspending the Gelephu Mindfulness City project until land claims are investigated and addressed, restoring press freedom, reinstating independent media oversight, and protecting journalists, ratifying core international human rights treaties and implement all UPR recommendations, and allowing resettled Bhutanese with foreign passport to visit Bhutan as tourist to meet their families.
Bhutan Watch is an independent, non-governmental international human rights think tank committed to researching, documenting, and exposing human rights violations in Bhutan. Its annual reports are used by UN bodies, governments, and civil society organisations around the world to inform action and advocacy.
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