Sebastian Strangio and Cheang Sokha Last minute slight of hand changes (to a sub-decree regulating procedures for screening asylum seekers) paved the way for the government's forced deportation of 20 ethnic Uighur asylum seekers, violating their rights under local and international law, an Australian academic has asserted. Sara Colm, a researcher for Human Rights Watch, said it was "astonishingly poor timing and a gross error in judgment" for UNHCR to hand control of refugee-processing to the Cambodian government at that particular juncture. Writing in the Australian magazine Eureka Street on Wednesday, Frank Brennan, a professor of law at the Australian Catholic University's Public Policy Institute, described the new sub-decree, passed two days before the Uighurs' deportation on December 19, as a "sham". Cambodia "may be a signatory to the [1951 UN Refugee Convention], but to date that counts for nothing", he wrote in the article.