RIGHTS VIOLATIONS 'CANNOT BE DENIED'

Human-rights violations, especially torture and abductions, have
become so frequent in Thailand that the government and society can no
longer deny their existence, a speaker from a regional rights
organisation said at the weekend.

Nick Cheesman of the Hong Kong-based Asian Legal Resource Centre said
the public has for too long failed to acknowledge violations such as
the abduction of people in the deep South and the torture of prisoners
in police custody.

Thailand's human-rights re-cord, he said, has never been as sound as
some local activists would like.

"There has been a general denial of serious rights violations, even by
people who work in the civil service, [but now] there's no way that
these violations can be denied," said Cheesman.

He was referring to alleged police torture of people accused of being
involved with violence in the South, the disappearance of Muslim
rights lawyer Somchai Neehlapaichit, the storming of the Krue Se
Mosque and the government's war on drugs.

Cheesman said the general public's feeling that people connected to
the drug trade deserved to be shot dead in the street will have a
detrimental effect on the judicial process and society as a whole. He
said he was most concerned about the attitude that only the innocent
deserve justice.

Cheesman told The Nation that such attitudes and the culture of
"official impunity" led to heavy-handedness in dealing with problems
in the South. Although the arrest of five police officers in
connection with Somchai's disappearance was an indication that
Thailand is more progressive than some of its neighbours, "It was a
great setback that, subsequent to the arrest, the charges don't fully
account for what happened to Khun Somchai," he said.

"It's clear that there were [higher ranking] people who were behind it
and no progress has been made. This is very disappointing."

Cheesman said hundreds of villagers have disappeared in the deep South
in recent years, each deserving as much attention as Somchai.

He said he didn't want to simply blame Prime Minister Thaksin
Shinawatra, because "the conditions must exist to allow a government
to behave in a certain way".

He added, however, that Thaksin is trying to give orders as if he were
an executive president, while at the same time there is no mechanism
in place to counterbalance his strength.

"So it points to a systematic problem," Cheesman said.