The Thai government should not dwell on the pain of defeat. Rather than sound like a sore loser, the government would do better to improve human rights at home and grow the backbone to denounce all forms of human rights abuses, regardless of who the perpetrators are.

Not being elected to sit on the Human Rights Council should not pose limitations to what Thailand, as a responsible member of the international community, can contribute to this noble cause.

The new council, created by a near-unanimous vote of the UN General Assembly on March 15 this year, supersedes the former UN Commission on Human Rights. It will have a greatly enhanced ability to address human rights violations. The council will meet at least three times a year, can quickly call special sessions to discuss urgent matters, and is required to periodically review the human rights records of all UN member states, including the most politically powerful.

The Foreign Ministry insisted that Thailand's failure to get elected to the human rights body had nothing whatsoever to do with the country's human rights record. Instead, a senior foreign ministry official attributed the loss mainly to a short campaigning period and the bloc voting and vote trading that are widely practised among UN member countries. But then, weren't all the other candidates subject to the same conditions and the same rules?

The top diplomat pointed out that Thailand's human rights record is better than that of several other countries that were elected to sit on the UN human rights body. That may well be true.

Seats on the Human Rights Council slated for Asia were taken by India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Japan, Malaysia, Pakistan, South Korea, China, Jordan, the Philippines, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Sri Lanka. On the council as a whole, some human rights violators, including Russia and Cuba, were elected. But this fact must not prevent us from making a candid assessment of our own human rights record.

In the eyes of the international community, Thailand's human rights record has deteriorated over the past five years, which coincides with the time that Thaksin Shinawatra has been prime minister. Thaksin's war on drugs claimed some 3,000 lives, many of them in extrajudicial killings by law enforcement officials. Not to mention abductions by state officials and the targeted killing of suspected Islamic militants in connection with the government's mishandling of the situation in the deep South. All these tarnished the country's human rights record.

The most notable example of gross human rights violation was the bloody crackdown on Muslim protesters in Tak Bai district of Narathiwat on October 25, 2004, and the subsequent brutal treatment of arrested protesters while in Army custody that resulted in more than 80 deaths. Most of these deaths were by suffocation, after the protesters were tied up and piled into overcrowded trucks while being transported to Army detention centres for interrogation. The incident drew condemnation from Muslim countries worldwide, as well as expressions of concern from friendly Western countries like the United States.

Anyone with a reasonable memory span will recall that the Foreign Ministry under the Thaksin government refused to allow the UN Commission on Human Rights, the predecessor of the UN Human Rights Council, to send officials to investigate the Tak Bai incident. An earlier request by the UN commission to look into extrajudicial killings related to the war on drugs was also turned down.

Thailand's Human Rights Commissioner Pradit Charoenthaitawee was more forthright than the Foreign Ministry when he said the main reason Thailand did not get elected was because of its poor human rights record and failure to sign the UN convention to ban torture. As a country aspiring to raise its international profile as an advocate of universal human rights, Thailand would do well to start by improving human rights at home. And perhaps start showing some backbone by speaking out against the atrocities occuring in Burma, our neighbour.