Thailand gave the world Bangkok Rules on women’s jail care. Time now for more law reform at home

“With good laws comes good society; but without the rule of law, good laws cannot happen. Rule of law is fundamental to all justice processes,” Kittipong tells The Sunday Nation, espousing the principle that law should govern a nation.

“It requires laws to take root in legitimate ground. It enables involved actors to gain legal immunity. It is what brings about justice.”

Kittipong describes the rule of law as “basic, but hardly measurable. 

“So we’re now working to create indicators to ensure that justice will be accessible to the general public,” he says.

This is one of the major goals the TIJ is determined to achieve and it vows to promote justice research and build crime and justice capacities.  

Formally established in 2011, the TIJ in fact dates back seven years before that to the development of Her Royal Highness Princess Bajrakitiyabha’s project to enhance lives of female inmates suffering from unequal gender treatment in the country’s jails.

The level of domestic success in righting those wrongs was so high that Kittipong decided to push the agenda in the international arena following his appointment as permanent secretary to the Justice Ministry. A few years later, in 2010, came the United Nations Rules for the Treatment of Women Prisoners – or Non-custodial Measures for Women Offenders – in short, the Bangkok Rules.

The TIJ functions as a semi-private organisation, government subsidised yet directly accountable to its board. With forging of the Bangkok Rules concept, the TIJ has also expanded its focus to include other fields including drug and narcotic laws and rule of law.

For rule of law, the TIJ has collaborated with the Thailand Development Research Institute in conducting research to develop a set of law indicators in line with those created by the World Justice Project, an independent organisation working to advance the rule of law globally.

The TIJ’s version would focus on criminal justice performance. To Kittipong, making this abstract concept tangible is essential so as to ensure the complex legal progress is understandable to the public. It is also a crucial step to carrying out legal reform.

 “Public understanding and participation needs to be included in legal reforms,” he says.  “Laws serve people – and thus we have to know what people truly want and why.”

Legal reform has long been on Thailand’s agenda, he adds, pointing out that his ideas on the reform’s significance were noted by the World Bank in 1977.

“But it could be hard to realise because the feudalism between political and justice arenas is in the way,” he says. 

“That is why legal reform is needed to open broader ways for public participation.”

For laws on drugs and narcotics, Kittipong sees the need to decriminalise some cases currently considered as crimes, particularly those against individual drug users.

“More than Bt10 billion of the Justice Ministry’s budget goes to the department of corrections. There are more criminals to detain each year,” he says. “This has been going on and on. Still, drug issues haven’t improved.

“Possession of a few drug tablets can land you in jail for years. For now, drug users are equal to criminals,” he says. “Some users want to turn to authorities for addiction help but are too afraid to do so.”

 The TIJ is now studying cases from a model like Portugal, whose several successes with drug decriminalisation have included a rise among voluntary drug rehab patients of almost 400 per cent.

From his experience as director-general of the department of probation, Kittipong feels that dealing with drug users with administrative measures could alleviate the situation. For instance, users agreeing to rehabilitation would be exempted from filing by court prosecutors.

Through this approach, he explains, authorities could save a large amount of resources that they could instead invest in working on root causes, like major drug dealers.

As this revamp of the law requires a thorough understanding of the situation and its ins and outs, the TIJ has brainstormed with the Justice Ministry and the Public Health Ministry to come up with the most effective approach that would largely depend on medical rehabilitation knowledge and resources.

Since its inception, the TIJ has placed feminist Bangkok’s Rules on its agenda to ensure that rounded and fair treatment toward female inmates is promoted and continued.

Adjustments to the traditional system and facilities are one thing, Kittipong says, but what is equally important is a true understanding of gender differences and conditions that would bring about proper treatment towards women in jails.

This also includes female inmates’ access to judicial rights when facing sexual abuse during detention, rights to obtain medical confidentiality and gender-specific healthcare, HIV and self-harm prevention, and steps to ensure inmates’ reintegration into society after being released.

“The Thai correction system was originally designed to deal with male inmates as there was only a limited number of female ones,” he says. “Today the gender proportion of the inmates is very different.”

Starting with a struggle, Thailand – with its ownership of the concept of Bangkok Rules – is now a learning hub for foreign officers who come to observe and learn from women's correctional institutions in the country.