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Freedom in the World 2004 - Thailand

Publisher Freedom House
Publication Date 18 December 2003
Cite as Freedom House, Freedom in the World 2004 - Thailand, 18 December 2003, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/473c54c923.html [accessed 7 June 2023]
DisclaimerThis is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

Political Rights: 2
Civil Liberties: 3
Status: Free
Population: 63,100,000
GNI/Capita: $1,940
Life Expectancy: 71
Religious Groups: Buddhist (95 percent), Muslim (3.8 percent), other (1.2 percent)
Ethnic Groups: Thai (75 percent), Chinese (14 percent), other (11 percent)
Capital: Bangkok


Overview

Backed by high approval ratings and a comfortable parliamentary majority, Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra continued in 2003 to carry out populist spending programs, which have helped spark a demand-driven economic recovery. Critics, however, continued to allege that Thaksin has concentrated power in his hands and muted media criticism of his policies. These have included a three-month police crackdown on drug trafficking in 2003 during which some 2,200 suspects were killed.

Known as Siam until 1939, Thailand is the only Southeast Asian nation never colonized by a European country. Beginning with a 1932 coup that transformed the kingdom into a constitutional monarchy, the army ruled periodically for the next six decades. The military last seized power in 1991, when it overthrew a hugely corrupt elected government. After soldiers shot dead more than 50 pro-democracy protesters in Bangkok in March 1992, Thailand returned to civilian rule when the country's revered monarch, King Bhumibol Alduyadej, convinced the military to appoint a civilian prime minister.

Thailand's export-led economy notched up strong growth in the decade prior to 1997, before being dragged down by the regional financial crisis. After spending billions of dollars fruitlessly defending the baht against speculators, the government floated the currency in July 1997 and agreed to a $17.2 billion bailout led by the IMF. Amid noisy street protests by middle-class Thais in Bangkok against corruption and economic mismanagement, parliament approved a reformist constitution and elected the Democrat Party's Chuan Leekpai, a former prime minister with a clean reputation, to head a coalition government. The new constitution created independent election and anticorruption bodies and introduced direct election of the Senate. While Chuan's tight monetary policy helped to stabilize the baht, the opposition blamed high interest rates for pushing the economy into recession in 1998.

Criticizing the government for supposedly favoring the urban middle class over ordinary Thais, Thaksin, a former deputy prime minister who built his fortune in telecommunications, unseated Chuan in the January 2001 elections. During the campaign, Thaksin pledged to help poorer Thais hurt by the financial crisis by introducing cheap health care, a debt moratorium for farmers, and investment funds for each village. Thaksin's Thai Loves Thai (TRT) party won 248 out of parliament's 500 seats and then formed a coalition government with three other parties, two of which it has since absorbed. The TRT won the elections despite a December 2000 ruling by Thailand's new National Counter-Corruption Commission that Thaksin had deliberately falsified wealth-disclosure statements in 1997 as a cabinet minister; he was cleared by the Constitutional Court in August 2001.

Thaksin's government has won praise from many Thais for largely sticking to its electoral promises by introducing programs to help the poor and small businesses. Low interest rates and populist spending programs have fueled a consumption-driven economic growth spurt. Moreover, while Thaksin arguably has concentrated power in his hands, he does not always get his way. His government has backed away from introducing a tough press law and from a measure that would have benefited his family's mobile phone business. Thaksin's coalition seems set to win reelection in polls that are due by January 2005 but will probably be held in 2004.

Still, many of Thaksin's moves, taken together, seem to run against the reformist spirit of the 1998 constitution. Some government policies directly help companies that are held by Thaksin's family or the families of cabinet members; Thaksin denies any conflicts of interest. While the constitution requires the prime minister and cabinet members to divest shares in companies they owned when they entered government, many of their families retain considerable business interests. Moreover, Thaksin has filed a series of libel suits against opposition lawmakers, a senior Democrat Party member told the Hong Kong-based Far Eastern Economic Review in November. Anecdotal evidence suggests that state-owned firms have placed fewer advertisements in publications perceived to be critical of the government.

Despite the high number of killings involved in a three-month police crackdown against narcotics traffickers in 2003, polls showed a majority of Thais appeared to support Thaksin's campaign to eradicate illicit drugs from the country. Thailand has recently been deluged with methamphetamines and other narcotics from neighboring Burma. The government claimed that most of the more than 2,000 dead were traffickers killed by other traffickers to keep them from becoming police informants. The regional human rights group Forum Asia, however, cited evidence that it said implicated police in at least some summary killings of alleged traffickers.

After denying that Islamic terrorist groups were operating in Thailand, the government took a more forceful approach to Islamic militancy in 2003. Authorities in the spring arrested at least four alleged members of Jemaah Islamiah, the regional Muslim terrorist group suspected in the 2002 Bali bombing.

Like other Southeast Asian countries, Thailand faces the challenge of diversifying its economy now that China increasingly is attracting the foreign investment that powered the region's export-led economic boom in the 1980s and much of the 1990s. Thaksin's government has pushed state banks to lend to certain industries, championed small and medium-sized businesses and rural export sectors, and promoted several industrial megaprojects. Critics allege that many programs carry high risk and could undermine the government's finances.

Political Rights and Civil Liberties

Thais can change their government democratically, although violence and corruption have undermined the integrity of elections. Thailand's constitution created a parliamentary system with a two-house legislature. The House of Representatives has 400 seats chosen by first-past-the-post balloting and 100 chosen by proportional representation, all directly elected for four-year terms. The Senate has 200 members who are directly elected for six-year terms.

As in previous elections, candidates spent huge sums to buy votes in the January 2001 balloting – at least 20 billion baht ($465 million), according to Bangkok's Nakhon Ratchsima Rajabhat Institute, which monitors poll fraud. The Election Commission ordered fresh polls in some districts but took little or no action on many of the more than 1,000 allegations of electoral fraud, leading some critics to suggest that Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra's party might have pressured commission members to overlook violations.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that official corruption is widespread, involving both bureaucrats demanding bribes in exchange for routine services and law enforcement officials being paid off to ignore trafficking and other illicit activities. The Berlin-based Transparency International's 2003 Corruption Perceptions Index ranked Thailand in a six-way tie for seventieth place out of 133 countries rated. In a positive development, the Anti-Money Laundering Office has indicted many small-time money launderers and ordered police to seize assets and property of many drug traffickers.

Although several legal and constitutional provisions formally restrict freedom of expression on specific topics such as the monarchy and on broad public order, national security, and other grounds, freedom of expression generally is respected in practice. Thai print media are among the most robust in Asia. Newspapers freely criticize government policies and report allegations of official corruption and human rights abuses. Several journalists, however, have been jailed in recent years on libel charges filed by politicians. Journalists, moreover, practice some self-censorship when reporting on the monarchy and national security issues. Broadcast media tend to be less outspoken than their print counterparts. ITV, a major television network, has become more muted since a company owned by Thaksin family members, Shin Corp., increased its ownership stake in ITV to 50 percent in 2000. In addition, the government or armed forces either directly or indirectly own or oversee most other radio and television stations. The 1941 Printing Act gives authorities the power to shut down media outlets, although this power rarely is used. The government does not restrict Internet use.

Thais of all faiths can worship freely in this predominantly Buddhist society. However, Muslims, who make up around 5 to 10 percent of Thailand's population and are in the majority in four of the five southernmost provinces bordering Malaysia, face some private sector job discrimination. Academic freedom is respected, and university professors and other educators can write and lecture without interference.

In a sharp setback for grassroots advocacy, several environmental and land rights activists and community leaders have been killed in recent years in cases that remain unsolved, according to a November report by the human rights group Amnesty International. Thai trade unions are independent, though fewer than 2 percent of Thai workers are unionized. Unions can bargain collectively on behalf of workers, though in practice private employers enjoy considerable economic leverage and generally set wages unilaterally. The law does not protect workers seeking to establish unregistered unions, and private employers often discriminate against, and at times fire, union organizers. Private employers, moreover, often breach the country's poorly enforced labor laws with violations that include using child and sweatshop labor and paying workers less than the minimum wage. Strikes are legal for private sector employees but not for state enterprise workers.

Though the judiciary is generally regarded as independent, it sometimes is subject to corruption, according to the U.S. State Department's human rights report for 2002, released in March 2003. Suspects frequently spend long periods in detention before trial because of heavy case backlogs, and trials often take years to complete. Still, defendants generally receive adequate due process rights at trial.

While the government denied that police had wrongfully killed suspects during the 2003 antidrug trafficking campaign, the high death toll appeared to continue a trend in which Thailand's poorly trained police often are implicated in wrongful killings of criminal suspects. While police occasionally may be justified in using lethal force against Thailand's increasingly well-armed drug traffickers and other criminal suspects, at least some of the killings are unwarranted, according to the press and nongovernmental groups.

Police and, at times, soldiers also continue to be implicated in torture and other abuse of suspects and prison inmates, according to the November Amnesty International report. The poor, foreign workers, and ethnic minorities are particularly vulnerable, the report said. Officers recently have also been accused of raping and extorting sex from female detainees. Thai prisons and immigration detention centers are severely overcrowded, and prison inmates generally lack proper medical care.

Many of Thailand's estimated one million members of hill tribes, who live mainly in the north, have never been fully integrated into society. Reportedly, roughly half of hill tribe members lack citizenship, rendering them ineligible to vote, own land, or be covered under labor laws and making it harder for them to access education and health care. The government in 2000 made it easier for hill tribe members to gain citizenship, but corruption and inefficiency reportedly have slowed citizenship processing. Police and soldiers at times carry out warrantless searches of hill tribe villages for narcotics, a practice permitted in some instances by law, but that often is carried out in a way that some academic groups say violates the villagers' civil rights.

Maintaining its long-standing policy of harboring refugees from neighboring Southeast Asian nations, the government provides, in its border areas, temporary asylum to more than 130,000 Burmese refugees. Authorities, however, at times arrest as illegal aliens Burmese living outside designated camps, generally taking them to the border and releasing them. Separately, foreign workers often face extortion and physical abuse at the hands of smugglers, employers, or local police, the November Amnesty International report said. Some Burmese workers who protested against labor violations recently have been arrested and deported to Burma, the report added.

Women make up more than half of university graduates in Thailand and increasingly are entering the professions, but they continue to face discrimination by private employers in hiring and wages. Anecdotal evidence suggests that domestic violence is a serious problem in Thailand. Police, however, do not vigorously enforce relevant laws, and strict evidentiary rules make prosecuting offenders difficult, according to the U.S. State Department report. The government has taken some positive measures such as deploying teams of female police officers in some station houses to encourage women to report sex crimes.

Some 200,000 or more Thai women and children work as prostitutes, according to government and private estimates, many of them after being trafficked to cities from their villages. Many prostitutes work under debt bondage, forced to repay loans by traffickers to their parents. Authorities prosecute relatively few traffickers, and many police, soldiers, local officials, and immigration officers reportedly either are involved in trafficking or take bribes to ignore it.

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