Human Rights in Thailand

By Don F. Selby

When the Thai state violently suppressed a massive prodemocracy protest in "Black May," 1992, it initiated an unprecedented period in Thailand. The military, shamed and chagrined, withdrew from political life, and the democracy movement had more latitude than ever before in Thailand's history, gaining an institutional presence previously unseen. This extraordinary moment created a unique opportunity for the human rights movement to emerge, for the first time, on a national scale in Thailand.

Don F. Selby examines this era of Thai political history to determine how and why the time was ripe for such developments. By placing greater emphasis on human rights as an anthropological concern, he focuses on the understandings that social actors draw from human rights struggles. He concludes that what gave emergent human rights in Thailand their shape, force, and trajectories are the ways that advocates engaged, contested, or reworked debates around Buddhism in its relationship to rule and social structure; political struggle in relation to a narrative of Thai democracy that disavowed egalitarian movements; and traditional standards of social stratification and face-saving practices. In this way, human rights ideals in Thailand emerge less from global-local translation and more as a matter of negotiation within everyday forms of sociality, morality, and politics.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Apr 4, 2018
• ISBN: 9780812295108

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Human Rights in Thailand

PENNSYLVANIA STUDIES IN HUMAN RIGHTS

Bert B. Lockwood, Jr., Series Editor

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

HUMAN RIGHTS IN THAILAND

Don F. Selby

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 2018 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America

on acid-free paper

1  3  5  7  9  10  8  6  4  2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Selby, Don, author.

Title: Human rights in Thailand / Don F. Selby.

Other titles: Pennsylvania studies in human rights.

Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, [2018] | Series: Pennsylvania studies in human rights | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017047292 | ISBN 9780812250220 (hardcover: alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Human rights—Social aspects—Thailand.

Classification: LCC JC599.T5 S37 2018 | DDC 323.09593—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017047292

For Mailan

Contents

List of Abbreviations

Timeline of Events

Introduction. Emerging Human Rights in Thailand

Chapter 1. Experimenting with Fate

Chapter 2. Political Struggle and Human Rights

Chapter 3. Patronage, Face, Vulnerability: Articulations of Human Rights

Chapter 4. "Kat Mai Ploi": Motherhood and Pursuits of Justice

Chapter 5. The Return of Coup Politics

Conclusion

Appendix 1

Appendix 2

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Timeline of Events

This timeline identifies moments in Thailand’s political history important to the emergence of human rights in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Its purpose is to help orient the reader for the study that follows, rather than to provide an exhaustive history of Thai politics.

1973

Student demonstrations in Bangkok against the military government force The Three Tyrants, Thanom Kittikachorn, Phraphat Charusatien, and Narong Kittikachorn, into exile, and democratic elections are restored.

1976

Students protest the return of Thanom and Phraphat, but the military and paramilitary groups violently suppress them and reinstall a military government.

1980–1982

General Prem Tinsulanonda becomes prime minister and issues an executive order offering amnesty to the Communist Party of Thailand (CPT) fighters, and the CPT sees massive defections, bringing armed struggle to an end.

1992

17–20 May: Black May. General Suchinda Kraprayoon deploys military to disperse up to 200,000 demonstrators in Bangkok demanding a return to electoral democracy after a 1991 coup overthrowing Chatichai Choonhavan’s elected government. Fifty-two officially confirmed dead.

13 September: Chuan Leekpai elected prime minister.

1997

11 October: The People’s Constitution replaces the 1991 constitution drafted by the Suchinda regime.

Section 334(1) required the passing of an organic law to establish the National Human Rights Commission within two years.

1999

National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) Act passes, and the process of selecting commissioners begins.

2001

January: Thaksin Shinawatra becomes prime minister when Thai Rak Thai wins the election.

July: NHRC formally constituted.

2005

February: Thaksin Shinawatra completes electoral term and wins reelection.

2006

8 February: People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD, or Yellow Shirts) forms, alleging Thaksin’s conflict of interest upon the Shinawatra family’s selling its majority holding in the telecommunications company Shin Corp.

April: Thaksin Shinawatra calls snap election, which the Democrat Party boycotts. Thai Rak Thai wins a majority. Thaksin resigns within two days of victory, continuing as Caretaker Prime Minister until parliament reconvenes. The Constitutional Court declares the elections invalid, calling for new elections in October.

19 September: Coup d’état, led by General Sonthi Boonyaratglin while Thaksin addresses the United Nations Council on Foreign Relations in New York; martial law declared.

Red Shirts (initially the Democratic Alliance Against Dictatorship but soon renamed the United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship [UDD]) begin to organize.

1 October: General Surayud Chulanont appointed prime minister (by the Council of National Security, previously the Council for Democratic Reform, which carried out the coup). Promulgation of interim constitution (providing immunity for coup makers).

2007

30 May: Thai Rak Thai dissolved by the Constitutional Tribunal for violation of election laws in 2006.

19 August: New constitution ratified by national referendum.

23 December: Elections won by Samak Sundaravej of the People’s Power Party (PPP), widely taken to be a proxy for Thaksin, who remained in self-imposed exile.

2008

September: Yellow Shirt (PAD) protestors occupy Government House in Bangkok, demanding Samak’s resignation.

Constitutional Court dismisses Samak for conflict of interest (after hosting two cooking shows while in office). Parliament chooses Somchai Wongsawat (of PPP) as prime minister.

20 September: Pheua Thai (generally seen as the third iteration of Thai Rak Thai) formed in anticipation of the outcome of the Constitutional Court’s investigation of the PPP. Yellow Shirt protests continue.

31 October: Thaksin tried in absentia and found guilty by the Supreme Court on two counts of corruption over land deal.

25 November–3 December: Yellow Shirts occupy Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport.

2 December: PPP dissolved by the Constitutional Court for electoral fraud; Somchai loses premiership.

3 December: The majority of former PPP Minsters of Parliament join Pheua Thai, but many join a coalition with the opposition Democrat Party, which then forms the government.

17 December: Abhisit Vejjajiva of the Democrat Party becomes prime minister.

2009

March–April: Red Shirts (UDD) protest Democrat government economic policies.

Prime Minister Abhisit brings troops to Bangkok to break up Red Shirt protests; over 120 injured.

June: Yellow Shirt leadership creates the New Politics Party.

December: Roughly 20,000 Red Shirts demonstrate in Bangkok, demanding new elections.

2010

March–May: Red Shirts occupy and paralyze central Bangkok, demanding Abhisit’s resignation and new elections. Military attacks break up the demonstrations, leaving ninety-one dead.

2011

3 July: Pheua Thai, led by Thaksin’s sister Yingluck Shinawatra. The Democrat Party resumes the role of opposition.

October: Controversial rice subsidy scheme guarantees a price for farmers, causing a spike in government debt and rice prices.

2012

June: Responding to a proposed reconciliation bill (granting amnesty to military personnel who injured or killed demonstrators and to Thaksin for his corruption conviction), Yellow Shirts blockade parliament to stall debate on the bill.

November: Massive Yellow Shirt protests call for Yingluck’s resignation.

2013

April: The Constitutional Court prevents the Pheua Thai government from amending the 2007 constitution.

November: Yellow Shirts protest amnesty bill that would allow Thaksin to return without facing imprisonment.

December: Responding to opposition pressure, Prime Minister Yingluck calls early elections for February 2014.

2014

February: Constitutional Court invalidates election results over opposition disruption of voting in several dozen constituencies.

7 May: The Constitutional Court invalidates Yingluck’s ministerial status for a 2011 transfer of the secretary-general of the National Security Council that violated the constitution. Deputy Prime Minister Niwattumrong Boonsongpaisan assumes leadership of the caretaker government until new elections, scheduled for July 20.

20 May: General Prayut Chan-Ocha imposes martial law and declares himself head of the newly created Peace and Order Maintaining Command.

22 May: General Prayut leads successful coup.

22 July: King Bhumibol Adulyadej assents to the junta’s interim constitution, which grants coup leaders amnesty for the coup.

24 August: Prayut formally appointed prime minister.

2015

March–April: Martial law lifted.

2016

Draft constitution ratified by referendum on August 7, providing for a Senate fully appointed by the National Council for Peace and Order, with veto powers over the elected House of Representatives on constitutional amendments; elections postponed until 2017.

Introduction

Emerging Human Rights in Thailand

After the Thai state violently suppressed a massive prodemocracy protest—itself a response to the metronomic return of military governance just months earlier—in Black May, 1992, an unprecedented period arose in Thailand. The military, shamed and chagrined, withdrew from political life, while the progressive spirit inspiring the democracy movement had freer rein than, perhaps, ever in Thailand’s history, and further, it gained an institutional presence unseen previously. Beginning with the Democracy Development Committee, which, through public hearings chaired by Dr. Prawase Wasi, solicited input across Thai society for the drafting of a new constitution, through to the promulgation of the 1997 People’s Constitution, the inclusive, progressivist spirit became constitutionally entrenched (Harding and Leyland 2011, 22; Kitchana 2006, 38). Through the 1997 constitution, it also found institutional expression in independent agencies like the Constitutional Court and the National Human Rights Commission of Thailand (NHRC). Thailand’s most democratic constitution (Harding and Leyland 2011, 23) was also the first under which an elected prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, completed his term, to say nothing of standing for and winning immediate reelection. Indeed, as prime minister, Thaksin initiated policies that were clear violations of human rights—like his war on drugs that led to thousands of extra-judicial executions—the NHRC was unhesitating in publishing a damning report of the government’s record (McCargo and Ukrist 2005, 249). This unprecedented moment offered the unique opportunity in rights could grow, for the first time, on a national scale in Thailand.

Based on fieldwork during this singular moment, shortly after the July 2001 appointment of the first tranche of NHRC commissioners and running to 2005, several months before the coup that would oust Prime Minister Thaksin, this book occupies itself with the question of how human rights emerged in Thailand during this period. As the descriptive project it undertakes aims to show, this question is inextricably entangled with the question of why this moment was ripe for the emergence of human rights on a national and constitutional scale. That is, there were egalitarian and, in some ways, nonconformist social, political, and moral resources that had been developing for some time, a generation at least, available to human rights advocates after Bloody May. Drawing on these resources—whether Buddhist scholarship, the egalitarian student movements of the 1970s, everyday practices of face-work and observances of social stratification and rank, or the moral force of motherhood—simultaneously afforded human rights a tint of familiarity that they otherwise lacked for most Thai, while altering the resources on which they drew in novel ways (orienting Buddhism to this-worldly concerns, recuperating leftist politics, inverting power and vulnerability, finding transgressive potential in motherhood).

Human Rights as an Anthropological Object

Attending to the entanglement of human rights with other social, political, and moral forms helps, rather than hinders, thinking of human rights as an anthropological object. It clarifies the understandings, practices, and struggles around human rights that are particular to Thailand and specifies how they relate to one another in contemporary Thailand, albeit with an appreciation of their historical depth. We can see the same sort of thing in the ways that E. E. Evans-Pritchard describes political systems of the Nuer not as isolated social phenomena but as knit into Nuer kinship structures and economy (Evans-Pritchard 1940); or in Pamela Reynolds’s discussion of child labor not as separable from other aspects of Tongan sociality but as coherent only with an understanding of its relation to the specificities of gender, kinship, and economy in the Zambezi Valley (P. Reynolds 1991); or how Clifford Geertz depicts political theatricality in Bali in relation to kinship, patron-client relations, and irrigation practices (Geertz 1980). In other words, human rights become visible as an anthropological object through interconnections with other aspects of sociality in Thailand.

This does not produce a picture of human rights that matches many of the views that dominate human rights debates. It does not accommodate the sort of cultural relativism visible in the Asian Values argument (see De Bary 1998; Falk 2000; Ghai 1999; Kent 1999; Mahbubani 1999) because it finds that Thai human rights advocates articulate human rights principles as consonant with dearly held values like Buddhist ethics. This is not the rejection of human rights (as Western impositions inappropriate to Asian conditions) that one finds in the Asian Values argument. Nor does the picture align with the more widespread view that human rights are necessarily Western, liberal, and freestanding and imply societal convergence on values (sometimes conceptualized as socialization into human rights values) (see, for example, Donnelly 1982, 1989, 1999; Howard 1992; Howard and Donnelly 1986; on socialization specifically, see Risse et al. 1999, 2013; on the interplay of coincidence and coercion as spreading human rights values, see Hafner-Burton 2013; for an argument in favor of recuperating Enlightenment individualism in human rights, see Ignatieff 2001a).

Shifts dating to the early 2000s in anthropological work emphasize local renderings of global human rights and related legal mechanisms, for example, as a process of casting human rights in the vernacular (Merry 2006b, 2008) or as structuring or textualizing local disputes, violations, and subjectivities (Ross 2001, 2003a, 2003b; R. A. Wilson 2003, 2009). These anthropological views constitute an innovation in anthropology’s range of approaches to human rights and helpfully push into the foreground the active reception of global human rights discourses and instruments, disclaiming passive adoptions of a ready-made package of moral and political principles, but they still do not quite capture the way that human rights emerged in Thailand. We might think of them, loosely, as focusing on human rights as an anthropological subject: in large part, they address the structuring influence human rights have on disputes and social actors’ maneuvering with and within such structuring. In this way, human rights appear as a subject, acting on social actors, their conflicts, and the norms and practices for adjudicating conflicts or violations.

One important strand of this scholarship, the emphasis on translation or vernacularization of human rights discourse, has leapt anthropology’s disciplinary borders to become increasingly pervasive in the broader human rights scholarship. Seyla Benhabib, for example, employs vernacularization as the hinge connecting democracy and human rights, as well as allowing for resistance to elite discourses (Benhabib 2009). Christopher McCrudden situates the vernacular differently, finding dignity to perform a vernacularizing function with respect not to the content of human rights but with methods of their interpretation and adjudication (McCrudden 2008). Gerard Hauser engages with Michael Ignatieff’s work as a formulation of human rights not as a set of moral absolutes but as a discourse that offers a moral vernacular providing for minimal agreement on the necessary conditions for a life worth living (Hauser 2008, 460). Hauser extends this analysis to distinguish between thin and thick vernaculars of human rights, the former circulating in official public spheres, the latter deployed by victims of human rights violations and their advocates (460). One could continue to trace the path of vernacular and translated human rights into media studies and communication studies (Gregory 2010; Brooten 2013, 2015). There is, then, a widespread adoption of a language-centered, top-down understanding of human rights (even where language may include visual languages, as with Gregory), in which human rights discourses undergo translation or vernacularization.¹

By comparison, in what follows, I place greater emphasis on human rights as an anthropological object in that I focus on what social actors do to and with human rights (for example, articulating them with and through Buddhism or harnessing them to the cultural authority of motherhood) and offer an ethnographic description of this work by social actors. I argue that what gave emergent human rights in Thailand their shape, force, and trajectories are the ways that advocates engage, contest, or rework (a) debates around Buddhism in its relationship to rule and social structure, (b) political struggle in relation to a narrative of Thai democracy that disavows egalitarian movements, and (c) regimes of social stratification and face-saving practices. In these ways, human rights emerge in Thailand less as global-local translation and more as a matter of negotiation within everyday forms of sociality, morality, and politics, albeit in relation to nebulous concepts and institutions (like the NHRC), with mysterious rather than transparent powers. Such (re)working is also what has allowed human rights to take on meanings as they articulate with and through other political, religious, and social discourses. I also show, however, that at moments when particular individuals—two mothers caught in land disputes with government bodies—found their claims to rights or entitlements went ignored or unheard, they explored nondiscursive ways to marshal the force of human rights, like gestural expressions of maternal dismay, perseverance, and authority. We cannot, therefore, model the emergence of human rights in Thailand solely on language or meaning but must use other descriptive vocabularies.

Fieldwork

The fieldwork supporting these arguments began in the summer of 2002, during which time I started making contact with the NHRC and the Office of the National Human Rights Commission (ONHRC, the bureaucracy, headed by the ONHRC secretary, that supports the NHRC).² In the summer of 2003, I continued research at the NHRC and ONHRC, interviewing commissioners, accompanying staff to meetings in which they deliberated cases and to on-site visits in cases under investigation, and engaging in interviews and informal conversation with them at work or, as an example, when we took meals together. I extended this research for roughly six months in 2004, at which time I also interviewed and attended events with former NHRC employees and several figures who worked in closely related fields, like health reform, public health initiatives, women’s rights, and a university human rights program. On the whole, as I will describe in a moment, this fieldwork concerned the struggles of the NHRC and other human rights advocates to define and disseminate human rights principles and to advocate human rights either on a preventive basis (to avoid the occurrence of violations in areas with a high potential for abuse, like prisons) or on a reactive basis, assisting those who had suffered violations.

At the end of 2004, the tsunami that smashed into the Andaman coast (to say nothing of the devastation in Aceh, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka, among other places) drove my research in unanticipated directions. Accompanying lawyers associated with the NHRC, I traveled to three southern provinces badly damaged by the tsunami: Ranong, Phang-nga, and Phuket. There, the lawyers embarked on a number of projects devoted to protecting Burmese migrant workers affected directly or indirectly by the disaster. I traveled with the lawyers’ team to the Andaman provinces through August 2005, as they worked on a DNA testing facility for Burmese who had lost family to the tsunami, rights education programs for foreign migrants, a collaborative rights education project with a local prison holding foreign migrants, anti–human trafficking interventions, and a number of individual cases of rights violations. This portion of the fieldwork also introduced me to antitrafficking and Burmese rights NGOs with which the lawyers worked in Bangkok and Mahachai (south of Bangkok), whose work dovetailed with the projects in Ranong, Phang-nga, and Phuket. In all of their work, the NHRC is either a direct or indirect participant, and so a preliminary sketch of the work it did during its first term will do important orienting work at this point.

National Human Rights Commission of Thailand

The commission consisted of eleven members appointed by the senate (reduced to seven by later constitutions) and is an autonomous body funded by the state and supported by the ONHRC. The ONHRC grappled with a proliferation of subcommissions that dominated their working days and a dramatic growth in cases between 2001 and 2005 (see Tables 1 and 6, below). A product of the 1997 People’s Constitution (itself stemming from the 1992 democracy uprising), the 1999 National Human Rights Commission Act is the NHRC’s governing document. The act instructed the Senate to appoint a selection committee of twenty-seven members (with legal, political, and/or NGO credentials), who chose twenty-two candidates. The Senate selected the first eleven commissioners from these twenty-two candidates and included five women, six men: NGO activists, academics, lawyers, an educationalist, and a journalist, giving the NHRC a broad and relevant range of expertise (Harding and Leyland 2011, 227).

We can see a slow, steady growth of complaints to the NHRC in the first full year of the operation, then a doubling, from January to February of 2003, with sustained, high levels in 2003 and 2004. Further, while one notes a general stability from 2003 to 2004 in the distribution of complaints as sorted by the type of accused party, there are massive changes in two categories: state project/policy, law, and government officer. Cases falling into one category could easily fall into the other, and it is not clear that the redistribution represents a shift in the type of violators from one year to the next or differences in how cases were sorted. The lack of data from 2004 on cases by type of violation is especially regrettable here, as one notes that in 2003, the proportion of cases by state project/policy, law, and police combined is almost exactly equal to the largest proportion of cases by violation, due process. A correspondence seems plausible, but with no way to track it from year to year, it is hard to arrive at any conclusion with confidence. Ultimately, though, what these data reveal is that, from its infancy, the NHRC served a significant and growing population. This trend continues, the cumulative average of annual cases only leveling off in the low 660s after 2011 (see Table 6; the NHRC source for Table 6 counts cases by budget year, from October of one year through the end of September the following year, accounting for the discrepancy with Table 1, which counts from January through December).

NHRC Data 2002–2004

Figure 1 shows the decreasing fluctuation in the number of cases approaching the present, remaining in the mid to low 600s over the last four years. This leveling off of an annual caseload is the achievement of a degree of endorsement by the Thai populace, of normality (not least in the sense of embodying or reflecting norms). It shows the NHRC as a reasonably, reliably accepted venue for leveling complaints of violation. That this level of acceptance has wavered only slightly through regime changes, coups, and the appointment of new commissioners as term limits arrived speaks to the institutional approbation and permanence enjoyed by the NHRC.

The process of filing a complaint has changed somewhat since the foundation of the NHRC, when it was located at 422 Phayathai Road, in the heart of Bangkok, a short walk from two Skytrain stations (the elevated metro system), down the road from the National Stadium and several major shopping malls. The Anti–Money Laundering Office remains at that address, but the NHRC has moved to a less accessible government complex near Don Muang Airport, in the northern extremity of Bangkok, well past the last of the Skytrain or subway stops. In the early 2000s, as Table 5 shows, one could file a petition by phone, mail, email, or in person (the latter of which was greatly facilitated by the NHRC’s location). In Rattana Sajjathep’s case, which I discuss in Chapter 4, she approached the NHRC in person to lodge her complaint. An ONHRC staff member received her complaint and, as they do with complaints received through any of the other means, generated a report. After the preliminary report is ready, a small working group (typically four or five staff members in the cases I observed directly) discusses the nature and merits of the complaint, deciding how to categorize it (that is, as a violation of a particular human right), and who the stakeholders are (as aggrieved parties—in Chapter 4, we will see that entire families may be included as co-petitioners even though only a single member of the family files the complaint—and as rights violators). The working group would draft a report that the NHRC could present to the National Assembly, use to urge the parties into mediation, or provide a paper trail tracking a case as it continues to unfold (often in close contact with the party who filed the petition). As we will see in Chapter 3, however, the NHRC can undertake investigations unilaterally (without a petition filed from outside) and/or in concert with independent organizations (like the Law Society of Thailand). Currently, the NHRC website also offers a hotline and a link with a template for online complaints but has no dedicated address for mail-in filing. Despite its increased inaccessibility by public transit and by mail, Table 6 and Figure 1 show that the public continued to file petitions in high numbers, indicating the sustained relevance of the NHRC to the Thai public, even in times of political upheaval.

Table 1. Complaints Received (by month/year)

Table 2. Complaints by Region in 2003

Table 3. Complaints by Violation in 2003

Table 4. Complaints by Accused, by Percent

Table 5. Complaints Received (by delivery method)

Sources: คณะกรรมการสิทธิมนุษยชนแห่งชาติ (2002, 2003, 2004); (NHRC Annual Reports, 2002–2004)

Table 6. Annual Cases from 1 October to 30 September

Source: http://www.nhrc.or.th/NHRCT-Work/Statistical-information/Statistical-information-on-complaints/Yearly-(2548-Now).aspx

Figure 1. Annual NHRC petitions. Source: http://www.nhrc.or.th/NHRCT-Work/Statistical-information/Statistical-information-on-complaints/Yearly-(2548-Now).aspx.

The existence of the NHRC is interesting in its own right, emblematic as it is of its moment in Thailand’s political history. What I explore in