It’s not listed in any of the human rights documents that the UN comes out with but let’s credit Gen Prayuth Chan-ocha with the Right to Ignorance. So they arrest this Kritsuda woman on 27 May under martial law.  After 7 days she fails to re-emerge, no one knows where she is, and then on 17 June her name appears on one of the NCPO’s ‘see me in my office tomorrow morning or else’ lists.  This was a bit perplexing since as far as anyone knew, she was still in the custody of the military.  How can you report to them when they’re holding you incommunicado? 

Permanent Secretary and Acting Minister of Education Suthasri Wongsamarn has announced plans to introduce ‘good deeds passports’ for all Thai students to encourage ‘goodness and ethics’ among the nation’s youth.  Students are to keep daily records of their good deeds and these will be signed off by the schools’ directors.  (It is well known that school directors have oodles of free time because administrative paper-shuffling in the nation’s schools is virtually non-existent; I can’t think what they get up to all day.)

After the first flush of pro-coup triumphalism, the Bangkok Post op-ed pages over the past two or three weeks have seen an insidious infiltration of exactly the kind of namby-pamby, woolly-minded, do-gooder insinuations that made the coup such a welcome necessity in the first place.

The Thai government must know how Luis Suárez feels.  Not in the sense of sympathy or feeling sorry for the millionaire delinquent, but on the lines of empathy, suffering in the same way.

Dear General Prayuth,