Junta to merge National Human Rights and Ombudsman offices

The junta’s constiutional drafters revealed a controversial plan to combine the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) with the Office of the Ombudsman, while the NHRC opposed the plan.

Bawornsak Uwanno, head of the Constitution Drafting Committee (CDC), announced on Friday that the CDC has agreed on a plan to merge the NHRC and the Office of the Ombudsman of Thailand (OOT) into one organization under the name of the Office of the Ombudsman and Human Rights Protection.

Bawornsak claimed that the two state agencies have similar functions. In order to increase the efficiency of the two to provide human rights protections and a one stop service for people to file complaints, the two should be merged under the Office of the Ombudsman and Human Rights Protection bill.

The CDC leader confirmed that the merging of the two organizations will not affect their work.

The committee of the new agency will comprise 11 people, seven of which will be from the NHRC. All members will be selected by the senate through a process similar to that for selecting the Election Commission of Thailand and will serve five years, according to the CDC plan.

On the same day, however, the NHRC issued a statement against the CDC’s consensus stating that the functions and duties of the NHRC and OOT are different and that a plan to combine the two might signify that human rights protection is being de-prioritized.

The NHRC pointed out in its statement that it is an independent state agency that has obligations to recommend to other state agencies compliance with the international human rights conventions that Thailand has signed or ratified and promoting awareness of human rights.

Moreover, although the functions of the NHRC and OOT seem similar in the sense that both investigate people’s complaints, the investigations carried out by the NHRC focus solely on human rights. Therefore, problems might arise if the two agencies are combined, stated the NHRC.

The NHRC added that it will cooperate with the CDC and send personnel to discuss with the CDC the pros and cons of the plan.  

In December 2014, the Sub-Committee on Accreditation (SCA) of the International Coordinating Committee on National Human Rights Institutions (ICC), an independent international association of national human rights institutions (NHRIs) from all parts of the globe which keeps track of national human rights institutions’ performance worldwide, revealed that it had recommended that the ICC downgrade the status of the Thai NHRC from A to B.

The SCA criticisms of Thailand’s NHRC noted that the selection of its members is not diverse, the professional independence of the NHRC is questionable, and that it has failed to respond to serious human rights violations such as the political violence in April-May 2010 in which nearly 100 people were killed in the violent military crackdown.  

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