The Bangkok Post newspaper of Tuesday, September 19 cited Vasant Panich, the human rights commissioner charged with investigating killings that occurred during the 2003 “war on drugs” as saying that the victims in cases he had investigated were mostly innocent persons whose deaths have never been properly investigated. Vasant, chairperson of the Subcommittee on Legislation and Administration of Justice under the National Human Rights Commission of Thailand, cited a number of ludicrous cases that he had investigated in detail: including the murder of two persons after they had just met the police, purportedly with drugs in their shoes; the murder of four persons in a single car also after reporting to the police; and, the planting of drugs in the underpants of a man who had died at hospital after the body had already been x-rayed. Vasant added that the commission had long ago submitted its findings to the government, but that they were apparently ignored.
Human rights defenders, journalists, academics, doctors and others have all pointed to how from February to April 2003 the police in Thailand were permitted, encouraged and even coerced into organising the killing of thousands of targeted persons and bystanders ostensibly on grounds of involvement in the drugs trade. That some 2500 people or more were killed during these three months–most gunned down in public places or their houses–has never been in dispute. That the deaths were the direct result of a series of prime ministerial orders at the end of January 2003 also is an established fact.
Less discussed has been the lack of subsequent investigations into the killings. There are many good reasons for this: among them, that the police are believed to have been involved in a large number of the thousands of deaths. The policies of the government of the time–the current caretaker government–also did nothing to encourage proper investigations. Alleged drug traffickers were treated as a special class of persons to whom ordinary criminal procedure need not apply. Any persons who happened to have the misfortune of being nearby a targeted person at the time the hit men came–at the dinner table, in a car, on a bicycle alongside–were bundled into the same category. Most cases then sat on police officers’ desks for a while before being deliberately closed without ever having been investigated.
In 2005 the United Nations Human Rights Committee, an expert body that monitors Thailand’s compliance with a key treaty that the country joined voluntarily in 1997, described the number of killings as “extraordinarily large”. It noted that any investigations, to the extent they had occurred, had “generally failed to lead to prosecutions and sentences commensurate with the gravity of the crimes committed, creating a culture of impunity”.
This September, the Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) received a letter from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Bangkok, putting forward the position of the government on the UN committee’s recommendations. In it, Kriangsak Kittichaisaree, director general of the Department of International Organisations, states that the justice ministry has been “ceaselessly coordinating with all the agencies concerned to implement the recommendations”.
The director general’s assurance that the committee’s recommendations are being ‘ceaselessly coordinated’ is especially interesting when it is recalled that one recommendation with reference to the “war on drugs” killings was for the government of Thailand to “conduct full and impartial investigations into these [killings] and such other events and should, depending on the findings of the investigations, institute proceedings against the perpetrators”. Somehow, despite so much ceaseless coordinating, this has not yet happened.
The question that must now be asked is: what will the government of Thailand do in response to these latest public allegations about the drug war killings by the NHRC? If the foreign affairs ministry is to be understood correctly, then investigations of thousands of cases should now be underway. If not, the question must be asked, why not? And the question that also must be asked is how can the government fulfil its obligations under both domestic and international law without such investigations?
The Asian Human Rights Commission calls upon the government of Thailand to respond to the investigations of the NHRC without any further delay. It calls upon the government to order continued investigations, and where necessary, reopening of investigations, into each and every case of death that occurred during and after those bloody months of 2003, due to the prime minister’s orders. It calls upon the government to explain how, in the absence of such investigations, it will be able to meet its stated obligations to UN rights treaties.
The AHRC also wishes to remind the government of Thailand of another of the key recommendations made by the UN Human Rights Committee in 2005: that it “should actively pursue the idea of establishing an independent civilian body to investigate complaints filed against law enforcement officials”. The AHRC, among others, has for some years pointed out to the government that until it creates an effective way for ordinary people to complain about police and have them investigated with a view to launching criminal prosecutions, it will be impossible to address rampant rights abuses, corruption and the attendant problems that continue to plague the country. As far back as 1980 even a parliamentary committee observed that for these reasons “the police department is hated and despised by all people outside of it”. No serious effort to obtain effective investigations into extrajudicial killings, torture, disappearances and other gross violations of human rights in Thailand will begin until such a time as this recommendation is made real. For this reason, if there is any single recommendation of the UN committee that deserves further ceaseless coordination among the concerned ministries, this is it.
