and meet with children, families, and officials to collect data on abuses and then set up fora to find solutions. Central to this model was that all parties would search for ways to resolve problems together. This way, he said, they could undertake “capacity building” for officials (not unlike the awakening Saneh advocated), so that they could learn how to abide by the constitution and avoid violating children’s rights.
An important agency for Dr. Chuchai was the police, who he said are major violators of human rights. His wish, though, was to show the police data on abuses without blaming them and without taking an adversarial posture; in short, he advocated the nonconfrontational ethos of Thai culture, as he saw it. To accomplish this, the NHRC would invite retired police officers to accompany them on investigations so that the police would listen and be able to hear their findings. Again, he reiterated, it was important to remain sensitive to Thai culture. Not all commissioners shared this view, though. Lowering his voice, Dr. Chuchai said that over half of the commissioners had rejected the original master plan he had drawn up according to these principles.
“Because they come from NGOs they are anti-bureaucratic. The problem is that they are [now] national commissioners, not national activists.” The commissioners, Dr. Chuchai continued, spend most of their time on case-to-case investigations and are only reactive.
“The commissioners are interested in their own areas, not in strategic foci. There has been a proliferation of sub-commissions,” he concluded. They have brought a negative attitude toward government agencies that has resulted in their adversarial approach to human rights. Dr. Chuchai found this regrettable because with the “charisma and social capital” of the commissioners, he felt that they could successfully mediate with government agencies to avoid violations.
Politics Otherwise
If members of the NHRC intervene in debates on Buddhism and politics in Thailand to promote an immanent understanding of Buddhism (one occupied with action in this world) and use human rights to awaken people to their own possibilities for liberation by avoiding abusive acts, then it is noteworthy that they have not incorporated ideas of monarchy into this understanding. Throughout my fieldwork at the NHRC and with lawyers working under its auspices, mention of the monarchy in relation to human rights was conspicuously absent. A quick look at the rhetoric and tactics of political movements and political leaders for several generations shows consistent—even pervasive—invocations of the monarchy. It seems unthinkable to mount any sort of political campaign without proclaiming loyalty to the king.
I contrast this form of political expression and the silence on kingship in discussions of human rights to emphasize the extent to which the NHRC was cultivating an alternative politics: not just another position within an existing political formation but a differently oriented politics. Commissioners like Saneh and Khunying Amphorn maintain the relationship between Buddhism and politics but direct it away from an explanation for or justification of social inequality based on kamma and toward a defense of human equality and commensurability, which lie at the heart of their picture of human rights. Prevailing ideas of kingship are coterminous with a view of Buddhism that places kammic inequality in the foreground, the king holding his position through kammic superiority. It follows that those who argue through Buddhism for equality rather than social stratification must also mute the kammic justification of kingship. Although they may not be in a position or of the disposition32 to argue the legitimacy of kingship, promoting human rights through an egalitarian Buddhism reflecting Buddhadasa’s denial of the importance of kamma in favor of quotidian striving for nibbana implies a corresponding denial of the link between spiritual merit and legitimate authority.33 It seems, indeed, a refutation of royalism generally.
What, however, might this sort of political orientation look like in practice? On the whole, the NHRC adopted an adversarial approach to human rights, preferring to pursue individual cases on a plaintiff-defendant model, particularly human rights causes (like community or environmental rights), in the mode of NGOs protesting an extravagant state. Such a model for receiving and investigating human rights violations may be inevitable, and it follows the Buddhist critique of social stratification, that is, the idea that nobody is above investigation, and nobody may, by virtue of status, abuse another’s human rights any more than anyone’s position is so lowly as to disqualify a claim on them. I did, however, see another expression of the presumption of human equality in Thai human rights promotion.
During a July 2005 trip to the Andaman coast in southern Thailand, the group of lawyers I accompanied worked to help Burmese migrants affected by the destruction of the recent tsunami. This population already felt vulnerable to abuses by Thai police and business owners, and the devastation many experienced as a result of the tsunami—including not only property, work permits, and visas but also wrenching losses of family and friends—haunted their lives with the threat of human trafficking. Their specific fear was that, if arrested, they would wind up sold to trafficking rings at the Thai-Burmese border. Two scenes will illustrate how the egalitarianism I mentioned above showed itself in the lawyers’ work.
Scene 1: The Military as Human Rights Defender
The threat of trafficking to Burmese communities in Phang-nga, Ranong, and Phuket had become a pressing concern for the lawyers. Early in July, they held a meeting at World Vision in Ranong, in a new, sparsely furnished but spacious building at the end of a muddy road, next to a Thai health center. Pinyo, who had joined the lawyers for this trip, explained that it had been built with a $500,000 donation from the Japanese government, primarily to address the health care of Burmese migrants. It served around 100 people per day and was heavily used by pregnant women. Having such a high level of contact with the Burmese in Ranong, it was inevitable that the staff would learn of cases of human trafficking and had recently interviewed a Burmese man who had worked several months without remuneration. World Vision had passed the information on to the lawyers, who were now strategizing how to address trafficking. They had started to discuss whether it was better to have a team come to Ranong or have migrants travel to Bangkok to conduct interviews when an army general entered. He was stationed near the border, and he and his soldiers witnessed human smuggling and trafficking of Burmese, a problem he attributed to mafia working in the area. That it was both illegal and a human rights problem was exacerbated, he said, by border police collusion with mafias.
“The police have the power of the law,” he said, “the army has only force to use with the mafia,” the problem being that the army has no standing authority to deploy its force as a law enforcement agency. They have, further, little power with respect to the police, he added, and so nothing they can use against police officers with mafia connections. Still, his soldiers witnessed trafficking, and he wanted, on his own account, to help confront it. Alip, heading the lawyers’ team, summarized the meeting and the team’s tasks on a poster, which I reproduce in Figure 2.
Figure 2. Alip’s poster.
The perpetrator-victim model is not absent here, but the interesting thing is the placement of soldiers as witnesses alongside the injured party, foreign workers. An abiding concern for Alip was that witnesses feel secure in coming forward. The implication of this meeting was that collaboration with the military was an important aspect of responding to human trafficking, both in receiving soldiers as witnesses, as allies of foreign labor, and in being able to ensure the soldiers, as witnesses, adequate protection. Collaboration with agents of the state arose again the following day, in Takua Pa, Phang-nga.
Scene 2: The Prison Warden as Human Rights Promoter
The lawyers had arranged with Phiphat Samphaonoi, the warden of Takua Pa Prison, to talk to foreign migrants held there. Departing from our mini-van, we entered the prison after depositing all
