The Thai government is seeking to pass legislation targeting nonprofits in the name of transparency. Activists, however, have slammed the proposal, saying it is designed to stifle civic freedoms and punish dissent.
Thailand has a 'military government dressed up as a civilian government,' critics say Image: Athit Perawongmetha/REUTERS
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Human rights groups have widely condemned Thailand's recent Draft Act on the Operations of not-for-profit organizations as a "veiled" mechanism to silence civil society groups and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).
If passed, the legislation would require any civil society organizations to register with the Interior Ministry, declare the sources of their annual operational funds, and disclose their audited financial reports.
Deputy government spokeswoman Rachada Dhnadirek justified the law as a mechanism intended to "promote transparency and accountability" of nonprofits, "not to stifle their activities."
According to Dhnadirek, there are a large number of NGOs in Thailand but only 87 have been registered, which keeps the government from overseeing them.
Amnesty International has slammed the draft law. The organization says it would grant Thai authorities sweeping new powers to place restrictions on foreign funding and the NGOs' activities, order surveillance and searches of NGOs' office and its members without judicial oversight.
The legislation would also allow authorities to jail NGO representatives and render unregistered NGOs illegal.
Josef Benedict, a researcher at the global civil society alliance CIVICUS Monitor, told DW the law is "another attempt by the Thai government to restrict or shut down critical civil society groups by introducing arbitrary requirements, squeezing their funding sources and creating a hostile environment for them to operate."
Benedict denounced Bangkok's latest measure as an effort to "silence criticism of the state."
"Authorities have escalated their crackdown on student-led pro-democracy protests, and attempted to muzzle the media and silence online criticism," he added, referring to Thailand's youth-led demonstrations over the last year.
'Open to interpretation'
Aside from its broad scope, the legislation’s imprecise language is also cause for alarm, Benedict says.
Activist: 'Informational autocrats' on the rise in SE Asia
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Section 5, for instance, requires NGOs to "act in compliance with the criteria, methods and conditions" prescribed by a government minister.
"None of the criteria, methods, or conditions are specified or defined, leaving this provision open to interpretation and subject to arbitrary application by authorities," Benedict stressed.
Anyone who violates the Draft Act by operating without registration within Thailand could face up to five years in jail or a fine of up to 100,000 baht (€2,600, $3,200), or both.
The Geneva-based International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) condemned the speed with which the legislation was pushed.
The Thai Cabinet approved the bill on February 23. A public consultation on it was then conducted between March 12 and 31, a timeframe the ICJ criticized as "considerably tight."
Crackdown on dissent
Emerlynne Gil, Amnesty International’s Deputy Regional Director for Research, warned that the law could also be used to target a wider range of groups that could be potentially defined as nonprofits.
Protest movement symbols grab attention
Myanmar, Russia, Argentina: Protest movements around the world employ symbols to get out their message. After all, a picture says a thousand words.
In Myanmar, people show the three-finger salute as a sign of protest against the military coup. The gesture stems from the dystopian novel and film series "Hunger Games" and has also been a symbol of resistance in neighboring Thailand, which has been under a military dictatorship since 2014. There, some protesters were arrested when they showed the salute.
"I can't breathe" — that sentence went around the world in the summer of 2020, when African American George Floyd was brutally killed by police officers in the US. People around the world demonstrated against racism and police violence. At Black Lives Matter demonstrations, they showed solidarity with the victims of police violence by kneeling down.
Image: Leonard Ortiz/Orange County Register/ZUMA Wire/picture alliance
A clenched fist
In the 19th century, the clenched fist was a symbol of the labor movement. Later, it became a sign of the Black Power movement, which grew out of the US civil rights movement and was criticized for its call for violence. The symbolic power is still effective today. At the Black Lives Matter demonstrations last year, protesters posed with their fists raised.
Protests are increasingly taking place on the internet and social media. This is evident in Russia: Under the hashtag "Don't be sad, everything will be fine" (Russian: #негрустивсебудетхорошо), people post pictures of themselves in red clothing. It is a way of showing solidarity with opposition leader Alexei Navalny's wife Yulia, who wore a fiery red sweater on the day of her husband's sentencing.
Image: Moscow City Court/Sputnik/picture alliance
Protest in green
In the struggle for the legalization of abortion in Argentina, the green scarf has become a symbol — for the right to abortion, but beyond that also for women's rights and the fight for equality. When parliament legalized abortions in December, people spoke of a "marea verde," a green wave that swept the country and the entire continent.
Image: Alejo Manuel Avila/Le Pictorium agency/ZUMA Wire/picture alliance
When high-vis vests become a symbol of protest
Not only colors or gestures have what it takes to be a protest symbol, as the yellow vest movement shows. The high-visibility vests were the distinctive symbol of the "Gilets Jaunes," hundreds of thousands of whom poured onto the French streets in 2018. The movement was organized mainly via social media and protested for months against the political course taken by President Emmanuel Macron.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/K. Zihnioglu
Umbrella revolution
In 2014, thousands of people in Hong Kong took to the streets for more democracy. The fact that these protests were dubbed the "Umbrella Revolution" by the media was due to the fact that the demonstrators took umbrellas with them to protect themselves from the sun, pepper spray and police batons.
Image: AFP/Getty Images/P. Lopez
Flowers for Belarus
Reacting to the police's brutal crackdown on demonstrators following the contested reelection of longtime President Alexander Lukashenko, in 2020 Belarusian women adopted powerful symbols of peace to pursue protests. Dressed in white and bearing flowers, they marched and formed solidarity chains in the streets of Minsk, the country's capital. Flowers have often served as a revolutionary symbol.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/V. Sharifulin
The Carnation Revolution
When tanks rolled through the streets of Lisbon in 1974, red carnations adorned the uniforms of soldiers and also stuck out of their rifles. Military rule in Portugal was at an end, and the upheaval ended in a peaceful revolution. The "Carnation Revolution" marked the beginning of a new democratic movement in Europe, and dictatorships were also overthrown in Greece and Spain.
Image: Herve Gloaguen/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images
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It would give Thai authorities the "power and discretion to enforce provisions arbitrarily and with discrimination to those with opposing views to the government," Gil said.
For Brad Adams, the director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia Division, the legislation is just the latest attempt by the Thai government to crack down on dissenting voices and trample free speech.
"Instead of realizing that they are unpopular because they have killed democracy, and young people fear for their future, the government thinks if it silences NGOs, their problems will go away. They are wrong," Adams told DW.
Thailand's military coup in 2014 brought current Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha to power.
Since then, civic freedoms and fundamental rights have become increasingly limited in the Southeast Asian country, such as the enforcement of restrictive laws including sedition and lese-majeste ruleswhich shield the kingdom's powerful King Maha Vajiralongkorn and the royal family from defamation.
Thailand's governing authorities are a "military government dressed up as a civilian government," Adams said.
