WE HAVE RECEIVED THE FOLLOWING STATEMENT FROM ASIAN HUMAN RIGHTS COUNCIL:


THAILAND: Bombing investigations reveal threats to rule of law

Recent reports on investigations into the New Year's Eve bombings in
Bangkok have revealed the extent to which the rule of law is now
under threat in Thailand. While the army has announced that it will
conduct its own investigations to clear military officers being
investigated in connection with the attacks, the police have
apparently reverted to doing what they do best: torturing detainees.
An article in The Nation newspaper of January 25 said that one of the
suspects had "hurt himself badly after becoming stressed by a long
interrogation session", supposedly by driving his head into a wall. A
senior member of the junta, General Saprang Kalayanamitr, has
meanwhile reportedly said that he will have any army officer involved
in the bombings "beheaded". General Sonthi Boonyarathglin, the
regime's chief, has reassured the public that this is unlikely to
happen as he believes that "no soldiers have done anything wrong", by
virtue of their supposedly not having confessed, and because keeping
munitions in one's home is apparently commonplace among soldiers in
Thailand. However, the police chief has been warned that it may be
his head to roll if it is found that the accused are mere scapegoats.


In fact, Thailand's investigative system is characterised by the use
of scapegoats. Were General Sonthi to apply the criterion for the
innocence of his own men (that they said so) to everyone else in the
country, the courts and prisons would soon be emptied. Among those
released would be victims of torture and forced confession,
fabricated evidence, faked documents and other gross breaches of
procedure and abuses of human rights. Late last year a senior
bureaucrat acknowledged that at least 30 per cent of criminal cases
lodged in Thailand's courts are without substance: anecdotal evidence
suggests that a large number of them are deliberately concocted, not
merely due to negligence or incompetence. However, the systemic
problems in the policing, prosecutions and laws that allow for the
easy arrest of scapegoats and dragging out of trials have never been
properly addressed.

In this case, the accused have already been pronounced innocent
because they are army officers. The case has been thoroughly
perverted from the start by intense conflicts between and among
military and police agencies, as well as by the usual preference for
collaring suspects and squeezing some sort of confession out--rather
than scientific methods of investigation--and the clear indication
given to the police before any proper investigation was conducted
that they were to pin blame for the bombs on people connected to the
former prime minister, not southern insurgents as others have
alleged. The mistake of the police may have been not that they went
after scapegoats but that they went after the wrong scapegoats.

The point is that neither General Sonthi nor the armed forces should
be involved in any of this. It is the job of the police to
investigate, of the prosecutor to review that investigation, and of
the courts to decide on anything submitted by the prosecutor. General
Sonthi's pre-emptive remarks on the innocence of the accused military
officers in this case speak perfectly to the utter contempt with
which his regime holds judicial process, and its sheer ignorance of
even the most basic principles of administration of justice. As a
result, he has undermined not only this case but also further
diminished the role of the courts, prosecution, investigating
agencies and other bodies.

The greatest damage done to Thailand by the September 19 military
coup has been to its judicial institutions. While the interim prime
minister has rightly said that the former government was responsible
for a "rapid deterioration" in the rule of law in Thailand, nothing
done by that administration can compare to the last four months,
during which time the junta has abrogated the constitution, shut down
and reinvented a higher court, reorganised investigative agencies
under its command, sidelined senior figures associated with the
previous administration and appointed its own people in their stead,
and wantonly interfered in the work of judges, police, prosecutors
and bureaucrats for its own purposes.

In neighbouring Burma, the judicial system has long been so
completely compromised by successive military administrations that a
United Nations expert has referred to it as a country under the
"un-rule of law". Thailand's own military regime is now pushing its
country in the same direction, back to a pre-1990s model of
government consisting of bogus constitutionalism, subordinated
law-enforcement officers and tightly-restrained courts.

The Asian Human Rights Commission again calls upon the lawyers,
judges, journalists, human rights defenders and other concerned
persons throughout Thailand to fight against the direction in which
their country is being pulled. For the sake not of Thailand but for
the whole of Asia, resist the movement towards the un-rule of law
before it is too late. Whether or not the country was facing an
imminent threat to its very integrity before September 19, as claimed
by the generals, is debatable. But it certainly is now.

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About AHRC: The Asian Human Rights Commission is a regional
non-governmental organisation monitoring and lobbying human rights
issues in Asia. The Hong Kong-based group was founded in 1984.