(New York) - Thailand’s general elections on Sunday, February 6, will take place amid steadily eroding respect for human rights under Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra’s government, Human Rights Watch said today in a briefing paper.
“Thailand has gone from being a beacon of freedom and respect for human rights in the region to being a country of high concern,” said Brad Adams, Asia director for Human Rights Watch. “Much of the steady progress Thailand had made in the last decade has been rolled back under Thaksin’s tenure.” Among the disturbing developments noted by Human Rights Watch are:
- severe human rights violations associated with the military crackdown against a steadily escalating insurgency in the country’s predominantly Muslim southern provinces, which culminated in the death of 86 protesters at the hands of security forces in October 2004 and a retaliatory spate of bombings and beheadings of locally prominent Buddhists, apparently by Muslim insurgent groups;
- the high human toll of the government’s “war on drugs,” which resulted in some 2,500 extrajudicial killings, and seriously hampered efforts to provide HIV/AIDS treatment to injection drug users;
- increasing restrictions on criticism by purging dissenting voices in the government bureaucracy and using government and private means to tighten control of the media.
