RIGHTS-THAILAND: New ID Card Creates Furore over Invasion of Privacy

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Mar 26 2004 (IPS) - Are Thai citizens on the verge of losing their right to privacy? That question frames a contentious debate underway here as the time approaches for the government of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra to introduce a new national identity card.

Human rights activists would have none of it, an indication of the deep distrust and suspicion they have of the government. But the jury is still out on what the public thinks. ”This is a dangerous initiative because it can subject people to abuse by the authorities,” Somchai Homlaor, head of Forum Asia, a Bangkok-based regional human rights lobby, told IPS. ”The politicians and even the business sector may use this information for their own interest.”

”We cannot trust the government with the information they want for these new ID cards because of the way Thai governments have used personal information to go after its critics,” added Boonthan Verawongse, secretary of the Asian division of Dignity International, another human rights group.

Dissidents, political activists and those who challenge government policies can ”easily become victims of harassment,” he pointed out during an interview.

These views mirror the objections raised this week by the country’s premier human rights body, the national human rights commission, over Bangkok’s plans to start issuing the ‘smart’ ID cards, as they are called, by Apr. 1.

”The National Human Rights Commission plans to block the government’s highly publicised plan to issue smart ID cards, describing them as a ‘serious’ invasion of privacy,” the English-language newspaper ‘Bangkok Post’ reported on Friday.

Human Rights Commissioner Wasant Panich was quoted as having said that the commission ”had no confidence the information would not be used by hackers or even government officials for business or other ill-intended purposes which could jeopardise or ruin the card holder’s life”.

What is more, critics of the government’s policy are accusing it of failing to seek the public’s consent over this scheme. ”The government has not made it clear to the public about what is in store; the people’s views have not been sought,” said Boonthan.

Currently, all Thai citizens are issued a light-blue coloured identity card when they turn 15 years old, and they get it renewed every six years. The information it contains includes innocuous details such as the name of the ID card holder, date of birth, gender, religion and blood group, in addition to a photograph and the holder’s fingerprint.

But the new card is expected to have a microchip that will contain a more comprehensive body of information. According to the ‘Post,’ 86 items of information for each individual will be recorded on the card. It will include full details of one’s health – including drug allergies – education, social security benefits and family members.

The government hopes to issue 12 million new cards during the initial stage and then work on covering the country’s entire 64 million people.

The Thaksin administration has justified the move as fundamental to Thailand’s shift to a high-technology paperless realm of development. Bangkok has also assured the public that the information will be held in secrecy and the individual’s consent will be sought before authorities access any details.

”It is a system that cannot be abused,” Suranand Vejjjajiva, spokesman for Thaksin’s ruling Thai Rak Thai (Thais Love Thai) party, told IPS. ”We cannot invade the privacy of individuals. It will be protected, since we are concerned about it.”

Thailand, however, is not the only country grappling with the ominous prospect of the public being trapped into a possible Orwellian world due to government access to extensive details of a citizen’s private life. According to Privacy International (PI), a London-based watchdog for individual rights, the move to introduce a high-tech ID card by governments has been witnessed in countries in both the developed and developing world.

They include Australia, Britain, Canada, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan and the United States.

”The existence of a person’s life story in a hundred unrelated databases is one important condition that protects privacy,” Privacy International argues in a note on its website. ”The bringing together of these separate information centres creates a major privacy vulnerability. Any multi-purpose national ID card has this effect.”

What will make the public even more vulnerable in Thailand is the absence of any laws that protect the right to privacy, warns Thitinan Pongsudhirak, a political scientist at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University. ”The citizens have nothing legal to guard them against abuse.”

The lack of such laws, in fact, have long been the case in the Thai political culture, he explained during an interview. ”We have not had laws that guarantee the right to privacy and confidentiality.”

For Thitinan, the government’s push towards the new ID card is but the latest in a series of attempts to invade the private space of individuals. The so-called social order campaign currently underway, where the government is enforcing curfews at night for entertainment venues, is another example he mentioned of this trend.

”We may soon have too much order and too little freedom,” he said.