The Union for Civil Liberty (UCL), a leading human rights advocacy organization based in Bangkok, has disseminated its evaluation of the human rights situation in Thailand in 2009, through the Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC).

Thailand is again in frenzy over coup rumors, perpetuated mostly by anti-government Red Shirts who need a reason to protest and by a media machine that needs a story. The top generals have denied that anything is amiss, words that mean little since they said the same thing before ousting former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra in 2006. 

Thai police and soldiers conducted a surprise raid on the Karen Information Centre (KIC) based in the Thai border town of Mae Sot on 4 February 2010.

The issue of autonomy has been steadily gaining interest and is now a serious consideration as a means of mitigating the long-running conflict in the southern border provinces. This is a positive step towards finding a political solution to the conflict because, short of a Carthaginian Peace, there is no military option for a solving an armed insurgency which rejects the legitimacy of the state. Yet autonomy is not a magical political solution to the complex problems fuelling unrest.

(February 5th, 2010) KWO is again very concerned about the forced repatriation done by the Thai authority in Nong Bua refugee camp. 3 families with a total of 13 people, 9 of them are women and the rest are children, including 9 month old breastfeeding baby were forced to go back to Burma today.

The Thai government has decided to put on hold its plan to send back the Karen refugees to the landmined Burmese soil, probably due to much pressure from international community. Here are interviews with the refugees by the Karen Human Rights Group on why they do not wish to be 'voluntarily repatriated' by the Thai Government.

A blog is a New Media tool that started many years ago.  It may be a diary expressing a person’s thoughts or a communications space for a social movement, depending on what the user wants it to be.  In some countries they have been very effective.

The Interior Ministry's latest decision to introduce its own cable-television channel - dubbed 'blue-shirt television' by the media for its close association with Bhum Jai Thai Party kingmaker Newin Chidchob - will further exacerbate the already tense political situation and is a reminder of how the government still thinks crude propaganda works.

(Bangkok, 3 February 2010) The Asian Forum for Human Rights and Development (FORUM-ASIA), a membership-based organisation representing 46 human rights NGOs across Asia, expresses its grave concern over the present political repression and human rights abuse in Sri Lanka in the aftermath of the presidential elections. All political actors in the country must take immediate steps to ensure due process and respect for democratic norms and human rights in Sri Lanka.

The revelation that PM Abhisit Vejjajiva’s father, Dr Atthasit Vejjajiva, has been contributing around 300,000 baht a month to bolster his son’s security has raised a few eyebrows. (More recent reports have suggested that this is not entirely true.)

The Karen Women Organization is urgently appealing to the Royal Thai Government not to forcibly repatriate over 3,000 Karen refugees staying in Tha Song Yang, Tak Province, back to a heavily land-mined war-zone in Burma. The majority of the refugees are women and children.

‘Thai E-News: News about Thailand that you may not have read in the news’ is the slogan of one of Thailand’s leading political websites.  It has only content and no web board.  It is unabashedly ‘red’, but red with a strange smell.  It posts critical points of view from all circles.

As a fan of Kdrama, indelibly touched like so many others in 2002 who would stop in at some public place or restaurant in South Korea hooked on catching episodes of Winter Sonata while it was being broadcast, I turn to readers and fellow fans to help make sense of what is going on in South Korea.

Phuttipong Pong-anakekul, a second-year law student at Ramkhamhaeng University, wrote an article in Prachatai in response to what Surapon Nitikraipot, Rector of Thammasat University, said at a public forum on 25 Jan. 

Reporters Without Borders and the Burma Media Association condemn the 13-year jail sentence passed on journalist Ngwe Soe Lin by a special court inside Rangoon’s Insein prison on 27 January. He is the second video reporter for a Burmese exile radio and TV station based in Oslo to be convicted in the space of a month.

Leaders of both the red- and yellow-shirt movements appear to have succumbed, in their self-absorbed way, to thinking of themselves as out-of-this-world characters - often to comic effect. Some time ago, the yellow-shirt People's Alliance for Democracy supremo Sondhi Limthongkul dressed all in white like some holy man, splashed his PAD followers with what appeared to be holy water, like that dispensed by Buddhist monks. That was at the height of the PAD's seizure of Government House.

Surapon Nitikraipot, Rector of Thammasat University, has spoken in a public forum in defence of the 2006 coup and its resulting constitution.  He argued that anti-coup activists should have also opposed the 1997 Constitution, as it resulted from a coup in 1991.  As a law professor himself, he said that there were no double standards in prosecuting the red and yellow shirts, except that the cases were being handled sooner or later.  

It’s been a bad week for the scam artists.

Sorawan Sirisuntarin, who markets under the name ‘Pa Cheng’, has been charged with violating the Pharmaceuticals Act. She had been peddling a panacea called Maha Bambad at 1000 baht a wee bottle and an eye lotion called Jiaranai Petch.

On 22 Jan, Kittichai Charnchoengsilpakul, Da Torpedo’s brother, together with some 30 activists, red shirts and monks, presented a petition to the Corrections Department, requesting the agency to provide medical treatment for Daranee.

BANGKOK, Jan 24 (TNA) -- Defending his government over recent charges by New York-based Human Rights Watch that Thailand violated several human rights principles last year, Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva said Sunday that some information in the NGO’s report might contain inaccuracies.