External resources relating to Thailand

As coronavirus lockdowns have been expanded globally, billions of people have found that they are now faced with unprecedented restrictions. Police across the world have been given licence to control behaviour in a way that would normally be extreme even for an authoritarian state.

More than two years since the National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO) staged a coup in Thailand, the military regime continues to justify its grip on power by running the systematic militarisation of law and the judicial process against its critics, political dissidents and ordinary citizens, according to a recent report by the Thai Lawyers for Human Rights. In doing so, the military has created its own versions of law and manipulated the entire justice process, depriving civilians of their rights to fair trial and violating their rights to freedom of expression...

Bangkok: Theerawan Charoensuk never thought posting a photo of herself on Facebook holding a red water scoop with greetings for next week's Thai New Year would result in her being charged with sedition and facing up to seven years' jail.

The bowl had a message from Thailand's former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, a divisive figure who lives in exile to avoid jail on corruption charges.

"Although the situation is heated, it's hoped that brothers and sisters will be soothed by the water in the bowl," it read.

After Theerawan, a 57-year-old housewife from the northern city of Chiang Mai, was taken to a military base for questioning, military spokesman Sansern Kaewkamnerd warned that Thailand's military-led regime is running out of patience with those it sees as creating conflict, as south-east Asia's second-largest economy enters an uncertain transition from strict military rule to what ruling generals describe as "Thai-style democracy"...

AN ORDER by the junta giving sweeping police powers to soldiers is part of the “steady erosion of human rights protections”, campaigners said Tuesday as they called for the law to be rescinded.

Last week, the junta government of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha issued an executive order awarding all soldiers ranked sub-lieutenant or higher the power to detain suspects for up to a week for a raft of different crimes.

The following report highlights three local and international companies that manufacture “non-lethal” crowd control weapons. These weapons are currently used by Israeli authorities and security forces, mainly to suppress non-violent demonstrations in the occupied Palestinian territories, in violation of the right to freedom of expression and association. Despite the fact that they are often labeled as “nonlethal” weapons, they have already been proven as potentially lethal in different incidents around the world, when the use of these weapons led to the death of demonstrators.

The report focuses on three types of weapons as case studies: tear gas canisters, which are produces and marketed by Combined Systems, Inc. (CSI) and M.R. Hunter; “the Scream”, manufactured by Electro-Optics Research & Development (EORD) and LRAD; and “the Skunk”, which is manufactured by Odortec, with the supporting companies: Man and BeitAlfa Technologies. The report will highlight the harmful consequences of these weapons, including their potentially lethal effects. The occupied Palestinian territories are being used as a lab for testing new civil oppression weapons on humans, in order to label them as “proven effective” for marketing abroad.

The annual Security & Policing (S&P) exhibition is marketed to both sellers and buyers by the Home Office, the department responsible for MI5, as a “closed” gathering from which the public and media are barred. All visitors must receive official approval prior to entry. Officials insist that the sensitive nature of some of the equipment on display – from mobile phone interception devices to sonic crowd control instruments – in the vast Farnborough International conference centre make it necessary to prevent any external scrutiny. But documents seen by i show that Britain has nonetheless thrown open the door to delegations from countries known to have poor human rights records. A list of the 61 countries invited to the show, obtained under Freedom of Information rules, includes six countries which feature of the Government’s own list of “human rights priority” countries, among them Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Colombia. It also includes Brazil, Hong Kong, Kenya, Nigeria and Thailand – all countries where there have been recent allegations of police abuse.