So another Constitution Day has come and gone.  Just as constitutions themselves come and go. 

But while most people just enjoy yet another December holiday, the fact that December 10^th is Constitution Day for Thailand tends to overshadow the fact that it is International Human Rights Day for the rest of the world.  And I think most Thais could be forgiven for not seeing an immediate link between Thai constitutions and human rights.

(Another international day that languishes in even deeper shadow is International Day of Volunteering, which passes almost completely unobserved in Thailand.  It’s on December 5^th.)

This year, there were hopes that human rights could make a rather stronger showing against the attractions of pre-Christmas/New Year shopping mall decorations, because this International Human Rights Day marks the 60^th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to which Thailand was an founding signatory.  A series of events and exhibitions, and even a concert, had been planned.  (Right next to the shopping malls, as it turned out.)

But sadly, the National Human Rights Commission, under whose large tent the little booths were sheltered, jumped the gun on the PAD and called it all off on account of ‘the situation’.  ‘The situation’ almost immediately resolved itself, so the shopping malls won again, uncontested.

But perhaps it was just as well, because the defence of human rights in Thailand is being exposed as a bit of a sham.

A rift is beginning to show up between on the one hand, foreign-based human rights organizations like Human Rights Watch, the Asian Human Rights Commission, and, after an initial local wobble, Amnesty International on the one hand, and many, but not all, local human rights activists on the other.

This division is saddening and debilitating at a time when a robust defence of human rights is ever more needed in the country.  But it has to be resolved before human rights protection in Thailand starts being seen as a joke.

The problem may boil down to one of impartiality. 

One of the seminal human rights works is the Rights of Man by Tom Paine.  Inspired by the American and French Revolutions and drawing an already strong tradition of radicalism, it sets out, in words that were unusually easy to understand, some ideas that at the time earned Paine the death sentence in absentia, but which today are almost truisms.

One is that human beings, all human beings, have rights for the pure and simple reason that they are human beings.  These rights are not granted on the say-so of some higher authority – government or monarch – which might change its mind and take them away again.  They are inherent in the human condition.  The only question you have to ask is – are you human?  If yes, then you got rights.

And that means we all have them.  Now the bulk of Paine’s book is an argument against aristocratic government.  And before the royalist eyebrows start twitching, remember that the book came out in the time of mad King George and effete King Louis.  The lottery of primogeniture had been throwing up some sad specimens.

But the argument against one person’s ‘natural’ right to govern (‘natural’ depending on (a) who your dad was, (b) having a willy, and (c) being born before your brothers) was based on the first of the three principles in the slogan of the French Revolution: equality. 

We all have rights and we all have the same rights.  You don’t have fewer rights because you were born the child of slaves, or because Lee Kwan Yew was your PM and he reckons Asians have different rights, or because of your sex, your skin colour, your chosen creed, etc. 

And you don’t lose your rights just because you decide to have ideas about how society should be run that happen to be different from those of the majority, or the government.

So if you are an incurable optimist and want to defend human rights, you have to defend everyone’s rights.  You can’t say ‘I think your side is right, you seem pretty nice people, and I love the colour, so I’ll defend your rights.  But you lot over there are plain wrong, you’re just a bunch of boozy rent-a-yobs who look awful in red, so I’m not defending your rights.’

In other words, impartiality.

And that s where the Thai human rights world has come unstuck.  What you hear from them again and again is ‘It’s a crisis, we must take sides’.

Taking sides means, consciously or not, favouring one group in the current political battle or the other, defending their rights but remaining silent on the rights of others.

That’s not impartial, and it’s not defending human rights.

But there is one way in which ‘taking sides’ does make sense for human rights defenders and it is enunciated by Angkhana Neelapaijit, whose husband is the most famous disappeared in Thailand.  Her organization takes sides.  It takes the side of the victims of human rights abuses.

All victims.