The Long Road to Civil Rights and Social Justice:
Advocating the People's Agenda through Parliament

BY JON UNGPHAKORN
2005 Ramon Magsaysay Foundation Awardee for Government Service
Presented at the 2005 Magsaysay Awardees’ Lecture Series
Magsaysay Center, Manila, 02 September 2005

The struggle for democracy in Thailand has been lengthy, arduous, and stained with blood. On October 14th 1973, a mass uprising led by students forced the military dictatorship to hand over power to a civilian government. This was followed by a three-year period of relative democracy in which students and intellectuals, influenced by democratic ideals and the Maoist ideology of the outlawed Communist Party of Thailand (CPT), took up the causes of the rural poor and the urban workers. It was a period of political turmoil in which assassinations of student leaders, farmers' leaders and the Secretary General of the Socialist Party of Thailand took place, and progressive intellectuals were branded as communists by right-wing forces supported by the military. It was the period in which I myself became politicised.

The killings and mass arrests of student demonstrators at Thammasart University on 6th October 1976, followed by the military coup d'etat which overthrew the democratically elected civilian government and drove large numbers of progressive students and intellectuals to the jungle areas to join the armed struggle led by the CPT. Others, like myself, found refuge abroad and campaigned for the release of political prisoners and for a return to democracy. Then in 1980, a new government led by General Prem Tinsulanonda began the transition back to democracy. General Prem had an amnesty policy for the students and intellectuals who had joined the armed struggle, and nearly all left the jungle, disillusioned with the CPT's lack of democratic values, and returned to their homes. Some started working with NGOs on community and social development, as they now saw empowerment of the people through development work as a better approach to achieving social justice than armed revolution.

The 1980s were a decade in which Thai NGOs flourished, developing close ties among themselves and then forming networks of organisations working on children's development, women's issues, human rights, health and consumer rights, natural resources and environment, urban community development, and rural community development. Thai Volunteer Service helped to train and inject young graduates with ideals into the NGO world, and to strengthen co-operation among NGOs. It was a decade in which the issue-based NGOs developed their community service skills and community-based NGOs started to develop their advocacy skills. By the end of the decade, a number of peoples movements and networks of community orgnisations had started to emerge, like the well-known Assembly of the Poor which is a network of communities who consider themselves to be "victims of over four decades of Thailand's economic and industrialization development policies" while "the rural agricultural sector as the backbone of the country economy was being neglected" [ http://www.thai.to/aop/index3.html ] The livelihoods and environment of many of these rural communities had been adversely affected by government policies or by government megaprojects such as hydro-electric dams, and they had formed a movement to . demand changes in policy and fair compensation for the appropriation of their land.

Indeed, the emergence of people's movements throughout the1990s could be seen as the fruits of over a decade of community work by NGOs aimed at empowerment of the marginalised. It was also a direct result of the multitude of effects of the economic boom and industrialisation on urban and rural communities which made their former quests for economic self-reliance and insulation from globalisation more and more impossible. Gradually people's organisations took over from NGOs as advocates of their own concerns and as negotiators with government over policy issues affecting their welfare. The 90's could therefore be seen as the decade in which Thai civil society movements were no longer confined to the middle classes, but had begun to encompass the poor and marginalised sectors of Thai society.

In 1991, a military coup d'etat once again put an end to a democratically elected civilian government. The military junta promised a swift return to democratic elections and appointed a respected businessman, Magsaysay Awardee Anand Panyarachun, as interim Prime Minister. However, in 1992, when the newly-elected parliament was dominated by a coalition of political parties which chose the military strongman General Suchinda Kraprayoon as Prime Minister, the middle classes rebelled, and after mass street demonstrations and violent military retaliation, the King intervened and forced General Suchinda to resign. Anand Panyarachun was again appointed interim Prime Minister, and paved the way for a return to elected civilian government. However, civil society was fed up with the old style of corrupt politics, and a movement calling for a new and more democratic constitution grew in strength, forcing parliament to agree to the drafting of a new constitution with the active participation of civil society. The resulting 1997 Constitution of Thailand is the most democratic constitution in Thai history (16 Constitutions since 1932) and guarantees the rights of individuals and communities as no constitution before it. However, the realisation of the basic principles of the Constitution has been thwarted by the lack of real political and social reforms, which are needed in order to make the Constitution function as intended. Instead, successive governments have delayed introducing legal reforms as stipulated in the Constitution, and have used political tricks to render the checks and balance mechanisms ineffective.

However, the 1997 Constitution did open a path for civil society leaders to stand for election to the Thai Senate as independent non-partisan representatives of the People. This is because the new senators are not allowed to belong to political parties and are severely restricted in their campaign methods and expenditures, thus opening up a more level playing field for the elections. The Thai Senate has 200 members, elected at provincial level on a basis of proportional representation (for example, Bangkok has 18 members), with a term of office of six years, and consecutive terms not allowed. The new Senate is much more powerful than the old appointed one, and has four main functions:

    1. Screening and amendment of legislation

    2. Monitoring and oversight of government

    3. Election of members of independent bodies*

    4. Impeachment of ministers and the Prime Minister

* these include the Constitutional Court, Election Commission, Ombudsman, National Human Rights Commission, Counter Corruption Commission, Audit Commission, Telecommunications Commission, and Broadcasting Commission.

A small number of NGO and civil society representatives, including myself, were elected in March 2000 to the first elected Senate. Together with allies from various professions, we form a de facto minority faction within the Senate, often called the "NGO Senator group". We consider ourselves to be a non-partisan and truly independent group among a majority of senators who are presently unofficially loyal to the Government of the Thai Rak Thai Party.

Our role within the Senate has been to take up the Civil Society agenda, working for respect of human rights, civil rights, and community rights as stipulated in the Constitution, greater social justice and access to social security and, most importantly, development of community empowerment and public participation in all decision making processes of government.

Although we form a small minority faction within the senate, generally getting around 30 - 50 votes, we try to maximise our impact by various means. For example, we concentrate on getting on a small number of Senate Standing Committees, so that we can form a majority faction within those committees, to carry out our intended tasks. We work closely with civil society networks to make strategic decisions on our agenda, objectives, and methods. We try to make the best use of the media to communicate with the public on our work and on the issues, which we are investigating. Very often, in our speeches, we are trying to educate the public more than to influence the outcome of a vote which we know we will lose. (That is why it is often said that even though we lost the vote, we won the debate!) Our committee investigations concentrate on human and civil rights abuses, social injustices, community grievances, and problems regarding freedom of the media. We also study and advocate measures for social and political reforms such as universal access to health and education and development of community media such as community radio stations. Our reports are released and publicised well before being taken up for approval by the senate as a whole. We make use of our individual and collective powers to ask questions to Ministers, to table ammendments to legislation, and to refer legislation which we consider to be unconstitutional to the Constitutional Court.

In present times Thai Civil Society is facing many extremely tough challenges. Rural communities of small farmers have a constant struggle to maintain ownership and control of natural resources such as land, forests and water, and to protect the community environment. This is a continuing struggle both with Government, Industry, and with various forms of outside vested interests. Our present Government has immense popular support and is the first single-party government in recent history, enjoying a massive majority in the House of Representatives. This is a government which could easily achieve social and political reforms, but which has chosen instead to severely curb media freedom, clamp down on civil society activities, restrict public participation, and distort the basic principles of the Thai Constitution. It has influenced the Senate voting in the election of members of independent bodies under the Constitution, so that these bodies are filled with government allies.

Under this Government and the previous Thai Rak Thai Government, Thailand has seen some of the worst human rights and civil rights abuses in recent history. One example is the crackdown on drug dealers in 2003, which led to the deaths of at least 1,386 people (Thai Government figures quoted by US State Department). Violence in the southernmost provinces has flared up extremely dangerously since early 2004, with daily killings of innocent people by small groups of local terrorists. At the same time there have been numerous reports of unlawful practices by police and military units against Muslims in these provinces with allegations of abductions, torture, and killings, including the deaths of 19 members of the Sabayoi youth football team in April 2004 and the deaths, while in military custody, of 78 demonstrators arrested at Tak Bai six months later. Altogether, over 900 people in these southern provinces have died in the past 20 months due to the outbreak of violence. The abduction in Bangkok and disappearance of the Muslim human rights lawyer, Somchai Nilapaijit in March 2004 has caused outrage among civil society as a whole, and among the Muslim population. To add fuel to the fire, the Government has now introduced an emergency decree, which presently severely restricts the civil rights of the citizens of three southern provinces, allowing for detention of suspects without charge and giving security officials immunity from prosecution as long as they are acting according to orders. These powers have been described by former Prime Minister Anand Panyarachun as "A license to kill".

Under this difficult situation, our work in supporting political and social reforms and the strengthening of civil society organisations and networks is extremely difficult. It is a long and uphill journey, which has to center on education of the public.