Human Rights in Thailand. Don F. Selby

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 this book, however, is the way that efforts to establish what human rights are and what they mean, as well as how to disseminate them, advocate for them, and protect them—work importantly but not exclusively done at the NHRC—are also ways of exploring and transfiguring everyday social forms and conventions. Experiments aimed at articulating human rights with and through ordinary morality and sociality (by discovering them in Buddhism; employing conventions of face-work, social status, and rank in their pursuit; or recovering political arguments for an egalitarian society) give human rights in Thailand their particularity while also introducing a turn in morality, sociality, and politics. I explore these themes throughout the chapters of this book.

       Chapters

      Probably the single most influential nexus of legitimacy in Thai politics is the point where Buddhism and power meet. Chapter 1 focuses on the way that Buddhism figures in the formulation, defense, and deployment of human rights, both overtly (in the speech and writing of commissioners) and implicitly (as organizing principles in the practice of human rights advocacy). Casting human rights as Buddhist involves, I argue, engagement with ongoing debates on Buddhism and this-worldly action, promoting a specifically egalitarian view of Buddhism that draws on the scholarship and following of the late monk Buddhadasa Bhikkhu (who prioritizes nibbana over kamma).³ On one level, this scholarship offers human rights advocates a theoretical foundation, allowing them to present human rights as ordinary (because Buddhist), as possessing a familiarity, once properly understood, that can lift the cloud of confusion many Thai encounter with respect to human rights. On another level, this view of Buddhism subtly implicates itself in the practice of human rights advocates, sometimes in unexpected ways, as this chapter explores through anti–human–trafficking initiatives and projects to educate incarcerated foreign migrants of their rights. While it is by no means given that human rights and Buddhism will prove reconcilable (as, for example, Leve [2007] demonstrates in Nepal), here they provide an opportunity to rework the dominant view of Buddhism and, in doing so, becomes wedded to Buddhism in a defining way.

      Chapter 2 moves from the emphasis on Buddhism and politics to examine the influence of democratic struggles on the NHRC’s vision of its mission and its heritage, as well as the specific implications this influence holds for human rights practices. Prodemocracy uprisings and their suppression by military and paramilitary organizations in 1973, 1976, and 1992 are all significant for the NHRC, but not all carry the same importance or approval among Thai more generally. In particular, I look at how the NHRC recuperates and inherits the “failed” protests in 1976, which have largely been expunged from the narrative of Thai democracy (Thongchai 2002) but that were probably the most conspicuously egalitarian of Thailand’s popular movements. Positioning human rights as emerging from (rehabilitated) leftist protests of authoritarianism gives human rights their shape and direction, imbuing them with this particular egalitarian ethic, but I argue that this inheritance goes beyond, so to speak, the story that the NHRC tells of its origins. The further influence this history exerts on the NHRC comes through the Ministry of Public Health (MoPH), which was welcoming to those students-turned-insurrectionists of 1976 who, upon receiving amnesty in the 1980s, relinquished armed struggle. The MoPH became home to many of them, and many refocused their energies into the nascent NGO movement. I have already alluded to the place that NGOs had in the selection and constitution of the NHRC’s first tranche, but I also examine in this chapter how specific individuals, drawn from the MoPH, brought their MoPH experience to bear on human rights practices through the ONHRC. In part, I show how this influence produced competing models of human rights advocacy and practice (a preventive model and a reactive, juridical model), creating a tension that was not definitively resolved but rather induced differing strategies for different actors.

      Chapter 3 describes the work of lawyers and their team in post-tsunami Ranong, Phang-nga, and Phuket. The lawyers, from the Law Society of Thailand (LST), were connected to the NGO Labor Rights Promotion Network (LPN) and worked with the backing of the NHRC. I explore how everyday social practices of face-work, observances of difference in status, and conventions of patronage (especially in ranked institutions like the police), all of which typically favor the powerful, provided the lawyers with important leverage in pursuing the rights of, arguably, the most vulnerable people in Thailand, Burmese migrants. In the aftermath of the tsunami, chronically vulnerable Burmese in Thailand found themselves in acutely precarious circumstances, having lost family members, homes and belongings, and legal documents like visas and work permits. Always wary of Thai officials, they could not bring themselves to participate in the Thai state’s DNA testing program (to identify those killed by the tsunami) or place trust in the police to protect them from the heightened threat of abuse by employers or human traffickers. Indeed, they saw the police as potentially connected to human trafficking. The LST lawyers embarked on programs to address these and other concerns but frequently met with police indifference, expressing the disdain that many Thai feel for the Burmese. The chapter attends to the ways that the lawyers deployed human rights in combination with the social conventions mentioned above, in an experimental fashion, to generate force behind the rights of Burmese (and other foreign) migrants. Beyond the immediacy of the tsunami, though, the lawyers also engaged in NGO work with the LPN and the Thai Action Committee for Democracy in Burma (TACDB). I study how they engage in longer-term antitrafficking projects in cities like Mahachai, a port near Bangkok, in industries, like fisheries, that have especially high rates of human trafficking and slave labor.

      Chapter 4 studies the long-term struggles of Yai Hai Khanjanata and Rattana Sajjathep with the Thai state and the city of Bangkok to recover, respectively, farmland flooded twenty-seven years earlier by a state dam and a Bangkok house slated for demolition, ten years previous, under dubious circumstances, by the city. Having protested without significant progress toward a hearing with state and city agencies, both Yai Hai and Rattana resorted to desperate tactics. The chapter describes how, having gone unheard for such long periods, they combined the moral authority of motherhood with provocative, extraordinary gestures to gain public support for their demands for justice. These bold gestures coincided with the infancy of the NHRC, which was able to play an important mediating role with state and city officials. The thrust of the chapter, then, is that Yai Hai and Rattana’s ability to embody familiar, potent tropes (like motherhood) to express their determination and dismay through well-executed and highly visible gestures, as well as draw on the institutional power of the NHRC, was decisive in the resolution of their campaigns.

      Chapter 5 assesses the changes in fortune of the NHRC as the national organ for human rights promotion and protection after night descended on the extraordinary moment of human rights’ emergence. That is, from the early 1990s through 2006, Thailand experienced roughly fifteen years of unprecedented progressive politics, even budgeting for the excesses of the Thaksin government. That progressive moment (dominated by elected government, the rise in stature and force of human rights institutions and discourse, and a growing freedom of political expression) entered its twilight in 2006 with the coup that ousted Prime Minister Thaksin.⁴ This chapter addresses the return of the coup-election-coup cycle of governance, beginning with the royalist Yellow Shirt protests of Thaksin in 2006. The chapter does not intend to present a thorough account of the political maneuverings of the myriad political factions and interests but rather judges the implications of successive military governments, constitutions, and dramatic enhancement and application of the lèse-majesté law for human rights.

       Anthropology