It is reported that National Human Rights Commissioner Dr Tajing Siripanit stated on national television that the Abhisit government would be justified in using force against the red shirt protestors at Ratchaprasong intersection ‘because they were disrupting shopping’.

Many have dismissed these remarks as the sort of thing you might expect when you appoint as Human Rights Commissioners people who don’t really know that much about human rights.

However, Prachatai has learned that Dr Tajing’s remarks form part of a long-term human rights strategy of the Thai government and ruling elite and should be interpreted in the context of Thailand’s candidature for membership of the UN Human Rights Council.

This candidature was also the object of some ridicule when the Ministry of Foreign Affairs opened its diplomatic offensive to secure election to the UN body. Snide remarks were based not so much on Thailand’s performance in human rights, which has been long on rhetoric and spotty at best in implementation, but is no more deplorable than other candidates for a seat on the Council. No, much of the criticism was motivated by Thailand’s apparent long-standing lack of interest in the international dimensions of human rights.

Thailand has signed on to relatively few international human rights conventions and agreements, often late, and normally with little more than token compliance. It has resolutely opposed any attempts to ‘internationalize’ human rights problems inside the country, arguing that if there were problems (which it often denied) they could best be dealt with ‘in house’. And its indifference to human rights violations in other countries, even those on its doorstep, has been expressed through a near perfect sequence of abstentions whenever a human rights issue has come up at the UN.

Thailand has for the past decade given every impression that it just doesn’t care. So why the sudden interest in taking a leading international role?

The grand strategy is apparently not yet complete and Dr Tajing was perhaps letting slip more than he should. But his lapse was telling.

Thailand thinks that the current set of human rights on offer are sadly lacking. And it wants to introduce some new ones, especially those more suited to the Thai context than run-of-the-mill freedom from torture, right to a fair trial, right to a decent education and so on, which don’t really do much for Thailand’s movers and shakers.

From Dr Tajing’s remarks, clearly the right to use violence on unarmed and peaceful demonstrators and the right to unrestricted shopping will be on the list. And this gives us a clue to how the architects of Thailand’s strategy are thinking.

They’re not so much inventing entirely new rights, but codifying rights that have long been exercised in Thailand, at least by certain privileged groups, but never actually written down and given the force of law.

Observers believe that the proposed list of new rights will be extremely long and may include the following:

the right to claim that a long and expensive schooling entitles the holders to regard themselves as ‘educated’ and hold in contempt anyone with a shorter or cheaper form of schooling. (This right will bear no relationship to any concept of wisdom, common sense or genuine intellectual capacity.)
the right to drive on any section of unoccupied road space that you can squeeze into, regardless of whether you are on the correct side of the road, of whether you are blocking other vehicles who would have otherwise unhindered passage, or of whether you have had to mow down any number of pedestrians to effect your occupation.
the right to change one’s opinion on what constitutes a human right as soon as one passes from the opposition side of the house and into government. (There is an optional protocol to this which lays out the right to deny point blank that you have done any such thing, no matter what the weight of evidence that proves you a liar.)
the right to use certain expensive makes of cars as offensive weapons against the class of person who could never afford one themselves.
the right to ignore any other rights, to ignore the will of the people expressed either through formal elections or informal means such as rallies and demonstrations, to ignore any abstract principles of social justice, equality before the law and such like, and to govern by means of quasi-religious beliefs in myths, fabrications and the assumed goodwill and benevolence of persons in lofty and protected positions.

These are, as I say, but a handful of the proposals that Thailand, if elected as a member of the UN Human Rights Council, may bring forward. And even a casual reading demonstrates that these rights are restricted to certain groups, normally elite groups.

For this reason, Thailand will be proposing one important amendment to an existing fundamental human rights instrument. They want the word ‘universal’ deleted from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

About author: Bangkokians with long memories may remember his irreverent column in The Nation in the 1980's. During his period of enforced silence since then, he was variously reported as participating in a 999-day meditation retreat in a hill-top monastery in Mae Hong Son (he gave up after 998 days), as the Special Rapporteur for Satire of the UN High Commission for Human Rights, and as understudy for the male lead in the long-running ‘Pussies -not the Musical' at the Neasden International Palladium (formerly Park Lane Empire).