On March 17, five years to the week of the disappearance of human rights lawyer Somchai Neelaphaijit at the hands of police officers, the ambassador of Thailand to the United Nations Human Rights Council insisted that his government is doing all that it can to conclude the case. Responding to the Asian Legal Resource Centre, Sihasak Phuangketkeow said that the government “attaches the highest priority” to solving the disappearance.
If this is true then it is an indictment on the entire criminal justice system of Thailand that after five years and innumerable squandered leads and opportunities, as well as a huge amount of publicity at home and abroad, no one has been held to account. There are some reports that even the one police officer found guilty of a relatively minor crime in connection with the disappearance, Pol. Maj. Ngern Tongsuk–who was released pending appeal–may have faked his own death in order to escape justice, which is something that he could only have done with the assistance of other police and authorities.
But it is more likely that the statement is untrue, that there is no high priority and no progress will be forthcoming, just like every other occasion that a statement of this sort has been made by a delegate of Thailand in an international forum in order to save face. The ambassador insists that, “We expect to have progress on this case in due course, and the fact that no announcements have been made on the case does not mean that concerted action is not being undertaken.” But the absence of both announcements and evidence of concerted action that leave persons close to the case believing that there will be no news any time soon. Indeed, if there is some kind of concerted action about which nobody is aware–not the family, concerned lawyers or human rights defenders–then the government should make this known. Otherwise everyone will rightly believe that this statement is just another red herring.
In either event, the wife of the victim has shown no interest in waiting any longer with the vain expectation of some sort of justice ever emerging from the system: something that is anyway by now impossible given the length of delay and the multitude of opportunities for the perpetrators and masterminds of the abduction to cover their tracks. On the very same day that the ambassador was making his empty pronouncements in Geneva, Angkhana Neelaphaijit lodged an application to the Civil Court in Bangkok for her husband to be declared formally missing. She made the application under section 61 of the Civil Code, under which if a person’s whereabouts are unknown for five years, it is possible to get this officially pronounced. Under section 62, the effect is then that the person can be declared legally dead.
Five years have passed since 12 March 2004 and no one is any the wiser about the fate of Somchai Neelaphaijit. While Somchai is soon to be declared legally dead, his legal case died long ago, in the hands of successive governments, senior police officers and justice ministry personnel who have all worked in their own ways to thwart justice and pervert the system of law enforcement to ends other than the catching of criminals. No amount of promises in Geneva or anywhere else will bring the case back to life, any more than they will bring back Somchai himself.
Unfortunately, the lesson from all of this is that the government of Thailand is , as well as making insistences that it is doing things that it is not, and that it cares for things that it does not. And while the case of Somchai has had enough force to at least oblige the government to issue rebuttals, there are thousands of others cases like this one in Thailand annually about which little, if anything, is ever said, and over whom the government is not even pressed to issue a denial. The only denial that the families of victims in these cases ever know is the routine denial of rights, the denial with which the government of Thailand is most expert.
