How refreshing to see a high-ranking Thai military officer expressing support for human rights.  In his statement at the 28^th session of the Human Rights Council on March 2 in Geneva, former Chief of Defence Forces and current Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister General Tanasak Patimapragorn had this to say:

‘Human rights exercised in an extreme manner may come at a high price, especially in unstable or deeply divided societies. … Freedom of expression without responsibility, without respect for the rights of others, without respect for differences in faiths and beliefs, without recognising cultural diversity can lead to division.’

How true that is!  And how Buddhist!  Moderation in all things.  Human rights are a wonderful thing, but they must not be carried to excess. 

In this, human rights resemble things like road safety.  It is of course correct to have laws that require the use of seat belts and crash helmets.  Or that tell you to stop at red lights.  Or not engage in heated conversations on your mobile phone while steering one-handed on the wrong side of the road.  Or not drive when you’re drunk (nor drink when you’re driving).

But to enforce these laws would be too extreme.  Where would the bodywork repair industry be if the number of traffic accidents were to suddenly plummet?  Think of all those panel-beaters forced into unemployment.  To say nothing of police officers obliged to go back to dealing with crime, rescue services who can’t afford any more spotlights on the roof, and hospitals being able to operate within their budgets.

And then there’s education.  Every child has the right to an education that will help them develop to their full potential.  And the state has the obligation to ensure that these rights are equal, and not rationed by social class, economic status, native language, ethnic origin, etc.

But it would be too extreme to expect the children of good people to attend the same schools as the offspring of the great unwashed.  So there needs to be a many-layered hierarchy of educational opportunity, where the already favoured can attend superior schools, either by dint of mummy and daddy’s wealth (in one of the hundreds of ha-ha international 95% Thai schools) or connections (in a tax-payer-funded school attached to a university education faculty, perhaps). 

Besides, who is going to endure the dehumanized drudgery of the minimum-wage jobs that the current economic system profits by if they’ve had an education that treats them like people with an opportunity in life?  Better that they be schooled as the rejects and losers that they truly are.

Or then there’s equal rights for men and women.  Quite right and proper and enshrined in constitutions past.  But asking for quotas for women in party-list MP candidates, or for at least one-third of the staff of local administrative councils to be women, clearly goes too far.  It is another good example of extreme human rights and I am sure the General will be congratulating the (five-sixths male) CDC for judiciously rejecting such outrageous proposals.

Oh sod it.  I’m getting nowhere with this satire, am I?  I keep thinking there’s a bullet-headed button-down-brained censor somewhere who is nodding along thinking ‘By the cringe, Harrison George is doing the government proud this week.’

Maybe Gen Tanasak could benefit from actually reading the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.  He rails against ‘freedom of expression … without respect for the rights of others.’  So look at Article 5 (1):

‘Nothing in the present Covenant may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms recognized herein or at their limitation to a greater extent than is provided for in the present Covenant.’

There you go, General.  A bit legalistic (though the UN thoughtfully provides a Thai translation of the entire document), but what this means is that you cannot use the right to freedom of expression to deny or restrict any other rights in the Covenant.  Happy now?

And how about the idea that ‘freedom of expression … without recognising cultural diversity can lead to division’?  Too effing right. 

So maybe the General can have a word with the Minister of Education (not a general but an admiral) who is questioning the first, embryonic and fragile attempt at first-language education in Thailand, with the complaint that the children in it can’t speak Thai properly. 

That’s the whole bleeding point.  These children are not perversely insisting on speaking Hmong or Akha or Melayu in defiance of the state.  They are exercising the right to freedom of expression.  And any attempt to violate that right – correction: any attempt to continue the decades-long discrimination against minority languages – risks division and conflict, as the General and the Lawyers Council of Thailand’s human rights subcommittee on ethnic minorities for once miraculously agree.

Mr. Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, said this in his opening statement to the Human Rights Council session:

‘In Thailand, which was once a force for democracy in the ASEAN context, the military authorities continue to silence opposition under martial law. More than 1,000 people have been summoned or detained since the May 2014 coup, and many of them brought before military courts. The legal prohibition on criticism of the monarchy has been increasingly deployed. At a time when a new constitution is being drafted, freedom of expression is needed to ensure genuine debate.’

So the Commissioner basically ignored everything Gen Tanasak said.

If only we could.

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).