NGO slams government over maltreated protesters | Bangkok Post: news

Thailand was criticized by a regional NGO over the prolonged use of arbitrary detention and harassment of anti-government protesters after the end of the ‘open violence’ in April-May this year.

The Hong Kong-based Asian Legal Resource Centre has written to the UN Human Rights Council on Tuesday that the use of the Emergency Decree to arbitrarily detain, interrogate, and harass civilians who have carried out during the July-August peaceful protests mourning the loss of life signaled the expansion of the temporary state of emergency to a more entrenched, potentially unending state of emergency.Three months after the cessation of open violence in Thailand’s capital, the Emergency Decree has remained in place and the denial of liberty and abuse of state power in Thailand has expanded, said the ALRC citing two cases of the Red-Shirted activist Sombat Boungarm-anong who was detained for two weeks before being released and formally charged with violation of Emergency Decree and the case of five students in Chiang Rai who in the middle of July peacefully held silent protests criticizing the government for the deaths at Ratchaprasong.Two of them, university students were interrogated, and a high-school student was later one faced harassing situations, the ALRC said.On the evening of the protest, Police Lt. Col. Banyat Thamthong, Acting Deputy Provincial Police Commander of Chiang Rai, called the high school student’s mother to ask for her husband's telephone number. After the mother hung up the telephone, three men appeared at her front door and identified themselves as plainclothes police. They asked her son who had persuaded him to join the protest and looked at her son's computer. Although they asked her and her son to come with them to the police station, she refused and requested that they return with an official summons. Then, within that day, the police lieutenant colonel came to the house and searched her son's computer.On the morning of 19 July 2010, police returned to the house with a summons and a search warrant. They took photos of the high school student's bedroom and seized his notebook computer. The mother was instructed to bring her son to the police station on 20 July 2010. The next day, the student was then ordered to report to the Juvenile Observation and Protection Centre.The high-school student had to endure lengthy interrogations as well as entered a psychological examination. Eventually, he and his mother met with the...