After three years of the junta’s ‘returning happiness’ mission, the country’s poor and ethnic minorities are still suffering from the junta’s ‘return the forest’ policy while the junta opens up more land for investors and cuts environmental regulations for big business. “In the next 10 years, the suspension of land rights will be a big …
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Citing further legal protections for LGBT people, the Thai authorities have introduced a bill to ‘certify’ gender identity. LGBT experts, however, have asked why they need the state to approve their gender identity at all. On 14 March 2017, leading LGBT activists and legal officers from the Office of Women’s Affairs and Family Development (OWAFD) …
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Thai transgender activist Nada Chaiyajit completed her undergraduate studies in August, and two months later, school officials told her 12 classmates – all men – that their graduation certificates were ready. But her college, the University of Phayao in northern Thailand, would not issue her documents because she submitted a photo in which she looks …
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Thailand is among the world’s most dangerous countries in which to oppose powerful interests that profit from coal plants, toxic waste dumping, land grabs or illegal logging. Some 60 people who spoke out on these issues have been killed over the past 20 years, although few perpetrators have been prosecuted in a culture in which …
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Despite global praise for Burma’s democratic reforms, the country hasn’t resolved its decades-long legacy of ethnic persecution. Burma’s refugees fear what will happen to them next. To learn more, American Jewish World Service’s Elizabeth Daube interviewed refugees living along the Thailand-Burma border. Naw Htee Ku doesn’t want to talk about the past. She’s sitting on a concrete floor not …
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