For more than two decades, nine different Thai prime ministers have failed to bring those responsible for the enforced disappearance of prominent human rights lawyer Somchai Neelapaijit to justice.
Official investigations established that Somchai was abducted in Bangkok on March 12, 2004. He has not been seen since.
Substantial evidence implicated a group of police officers, who allegedly sought retaliation for Somchai’s involvement in lawsuits regarding widespread police torture of Muslim suspects in Thailand’s insurgency-ridden southern border provinces.
In January 2006, then-Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra publicly said: “The DSI [Ministry of Justice’s Department of Special Investigation] is working on this case and murder charges are being considered. I know Somchai is dead, circumstantial evidence indicated that ... and there were more than four [police] officers implicated by the investigation.”
But in December 2015, the Supreme Court acquitted five police officers charged in the case. The ruling has also barred Somchai’s family from acting as a coplaintiff in efforts to obtain justice, stating that there is no evidence showing he is dead or otherwise incapable of bringing the case himself.
Thailand is a state party to the United Nations International Convention against Enforced Disappearance. In 2023, Thailand’s own Prevention and Suppression of Torture and Enforced Disappearance Act went into effect. Yet the current government of Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra has made no commitment to solve Somchai’s case.
This lack of political will to resolve enforced disappearances is evident in all other Thai cases as well. The UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances currently records 77 cases in Thailand that have not been resolved.
Angkhana Neelapaijit, Somchai’s wife and chairperson of Thailand’s Senate Human Rights Committee, told Human Rights Watch that Thai authorities have pressured at least 15 families in recent months to withdraw their cases from the UN working group, seemingly to improve the country’s reputation now that Thailand has joined the UN Human Rights Council for the 2025-2027 term.
Efforts to silence families of those forcibly disappeared will not make demands for justice disappear. The families of Somchai and other victims need to know that the Thai government is doing all it can to learn the fate of their loved ones and bring those responsible to account.
