In this timely book, Don F. Selby analyses how a discourse on human rights emerged in Thailand between 2001 and 2005. Instead of viewing the emergence of human rights along the line of Western liberal tradition or the cultural relativism of the ‘Asian values’ argument, Selby treats human rights as an anthropological object by focusing on what social actors do to and with human rights. He argues that ‘what gave emergent human rights in Thailand their shape, force, and trajectories’ are the ways that activists engage, contest, or rework Buddhism, the struggle of democratic movements, and regimes of social stratification and face-saving practices (p. 4).
The book is divided into five chapters. Chapter 1 examines how Buddhism has become a resource for human rights. It focuses on the way that prominent commissioners in the National Human Rights Commission of Thailand (NHRC) articulate human rights with Buddhist ethics, claiming that Buddhism teaches people to live together with kindness, to sympathise, to help one another. Therefore, there is no need to search for a place for human rights in Buddhism; they are ‘available in Buddhism, so that they are not an import, not grafted on to Buddhism, but arise, as it were, naturally and harmoniously with Buddhism’ (p. 20).
Chapter 2 looks at the influence of the democratic struggles in 1973, 1976, and 1992 on the NHRC and human rights practices in Thailand. The NHRC envisions itself as an inheritor of these struggles. According to Selby, ‘positioning human rights as emerging from … leftist protests of authoritarianism gives human rights their shape and direction, imbuing them with this particular egalitarian ethic’ (p. 12). In addition, Selby points out that democratic struggles in the past influenced the NHRC through the Ministry of Public Health (MoPH), which welcomed students who returned from the jungle where they had joined the Communist Party of Thailand's armed struggle after the 6 October 1976 massacre. Some of these returned students went on to work with the MoPH, while others joined NGO movements. Later, they would play important roles in the NHRC.
Chapter 3 explores the effort to protect the rights of Burmese migrants, the most vulnerable people in Thailand, by lawyers from the Law Society of Thailand. Selby points out that Burmese migrants faced continual abuse from Thai government officials and risked becoming victims of human trafficking. To help them the lawyers deployed human rights in combination with social conventions, such as, everyday social practices of face-work, observances of differences in status, and conventions of patronage. Such social conventions which normally favour the powerful gave the lawyers important leverage in pursuing the rights of Burmese migrants.
Chapter 4 examines the struggles of two women, Hai Khanjanta and Rattana Sajjathep. Hai engaged in a prolonged struggle with the Thai state over land flooded by a dam project, while Rattana campaigned against a City of Bangkok order to demolish her house. Both of them won their cases after fighting for twenty-six years and over a decade, respectively. According to Selby, their successes were based on a combination of ‘the moral authority of motherhood with provocative, extraordinary gestures to gain public support for their demands for justice’. Their successes also drew on the institutional power of the NHRC (p. 13).
Chapter 5 looks at the implications of the 2006 and 2015 coups for human rights. Selby points out that the coup against elected prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra in 2006 signalled the decline of human rights protection in Thailand. After the coup, hundreds of democratic activists were arbitrarily arrested and charged with lèse-majesté. Moreover, under the 2016 Constitution, the NHRC was incorporated into the service of the state ‘in a way that would compromise its investigative freedom and moral authority as an autonomous entity’ (p. 140).
There are a few problems with this book. First, it focuses solely on the NHRC as if there were no other actors contributing to human rights development in Thailand. Major rural grassroots movements such as the Small-Scale Farmers’ Assembly of Isan (Somchai Phatharathananunth, Civil society and democratization: Social movements in Northeast Thailand, 2006) and the Assembly of the Poor (Prapas Pintoktang, Street politics: 99 days of the Assembly of the Poor, 1998), who actively struggle for ‘the right to have rights’, were left out from this study, even though they played major roles in the struggle for human rights in Thailand. Second, this study fails to address the anti-human rights actions of the NHRC. The NHRC not only supported the 2006 and 2015 coups, but also a brutal crackdown on a protest in May 2010 in which nearly 100 people died and more than 2,000 were injured. Any book on human rights in Thailand must examine this issue seriously.
