Human Rights in Thailand. Don F. Selby
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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)