News reports said that police were compiling video footage and other evidence of demonstrators that threw rocks at vehicles, assaulted passerby, damaged public property and kept parliamentarians trapped within the legislature.

These are serious offenses and if the police have the evidence they need, they should certainly try to prosecute. But the crimes of this group pale by comparison to the scale of criminality demonstrated by their opponents, those who occupied Government House for three months from August, and the two main airports for a week from the end of November.

In fact, the number of serious crimes committed under the banner of the group calling itself the People’s Alliance for Democracy is so large that it’s hard to imagine police officers even having time to investigate the melee outside parliament on Monday.

From all accounts, parts of the prime minister’s offices had over the three months that they were besieged been completely ransacked. The occupiers stole computers, televisions and the personal items of public servants. They raided arsenals and made off with pistols and, possibly, semi-automatic weapons.

They vandalized furniture and the buildings themselves, smashing and ripping chairs and wallpaper. They drove off a number of cars and motorcycles, and took religious statues and amulets.

The costs to the government will run into millions of dollars. To replace damaged and missing computer equipment alone is expected to be over a million, although bureaucrats could perhaps save some money by repurchasing the stolen items as they appear in secondhand markets around Bangkok during the coming days and weeks.

The damage was not only financial. According to several reports, a number of high-security computer hard disks, including servers, were among those items that have disappeared. So far there have been no public reports on the precise contents of these, or the threats posed to the government and public by their falling into private hands.

That’s what was taken. Then there’s what was left behind. The list allegedly includes hundreds of homemade explosives of various types, including Molotov cocktails, firecrackers, and fertilizer and ping pong bombs. There were also bottles of acid, and large numbers of assorted objects to use as weapons, including golf clubs, iron bars, and slingshots with various types of pellets.

Oh, yes, and there was a dead body at Don Muang airport, stuffed into a plastic bag out back. According to news reports, the unidentified man had apparently been dead for some days and had been assaulted before he died. He may have been one of the proxy police force that patrolled the perimeters of occupied buildings and interrogated, detained and assaulted other citizens.

Others left for dead survived. Among them, a 26-year-old man was reported to have been found HCG diet near the international airport on the night of December 1, stripped naked and shot in the neck. At time of the report, he had been unable to speak about what had happened.

Although it may take the police some time to sift through the mountains of evidence in order to bring charges against people accused of these offenses,  the ringleaders and some of the most visible perpetrators could be legally brought in any time.

There has been some talk about the possibility of charging them with terrorism, which under the penal code consists of acts of violence HCG drops causing danger to life or liberty, serious damage to transport and communications, or acts effecting significant economic damage with intent to threaten the government.

By these criteria, the people who took over state premises and killed—or attempted to kill—and illegally detained other citizens have, on the surface of it, committed terrorist acts.

But there are innumerable other sections in the code under which they could be charged.

Why not begin with the usual bundle of offenses that is thrown at protesters? That includes trespass, coercion, upsetting the peace, HCG diet plan confinement and damaging public property. Police usually routinely start with these, whether they have any evidence or not.

Then there are all of the other ordinary criminal offenses, including murder, attempted murder, manslaughter, bodily harm, theft, HCG diet side effects mischief, and destroying or stealing official documents or materials, which carries a three-year jail term; or criminal conspiracy, which carries five.

After that, there’s still the chapter of offenses against internal security. These include attempts to change the law or government through violence, the raising of civil unrest to upset public tranquility, or the inciting of the people to violate the law, all of which carry a seven-year sentence. The PAD leadership seems to have met every one of those criteria too.

And there are many other assorted crimes that remain besides. For instance, refusing police access to sites where bomb blasts occurred they seem to have violated section 138, on obstructing officials from performing their duties. That HCG side effects in men section has a penalty of two years. If threatening officials with violence at the same time, four years; if doing the same with arms or in a group of three or more, five years. And so it goes on.

There is no shortage of crimes, perpetrators, evidence and penalties with which to bring the PAD to book. What is lacking is only the legal and political will to do it.

The gang outside parliament this week threatened the building and its occupants. The gang that took over government house and the airports has threatened what that building and its occupants represent. As a matter of urgency, the police must prosecute both. But their unmistakable priority must be the latter. Prosecute the PAD.

Freedom Against Censorship Thailand notes with concern that most of the pages on the Ministry of Information and Communication Technology blacklist are being kept under wraps with the aid of the courts and a new cybercrime law.

The list includes chat pages on the sites of local independent media agencies like Prachatai and Fah Diew Kan, which are both subject to constant monitoring and police harassment, and a couple from The Economist. But by far the largest number of pages is from YouTube and other video sharing sites.

What the banned addresses have in common is that, predominantly, their subject matter is the royal family.

The Economist articles, for instance, both blamed the royalty and antiquated laws protecting it from head to foot for much of Thailand’s current turmoil. “It cannot be good for a country to subscribe to a fairy-tale version of its own history in which the king never does wrong,” one said.

Although the magazine has not been banned in Thailand, the edition with the two offending pieces was not available on the stands after distributors reportedly declined to import or release it.

Even then, the Bangkok Post printed a bland rejoinder from a former foreign minister who unsuccessfully bid for the top job in the United Nations, without publishing any part of the article to which he was responding. Perhaps it expected readers to find their way around the online barricade so as to read what all the fuss was about anyway.

The list accounts for only some of the total number of sites in the ministry’s bad books. The newest minister has been quoted as saying that so far 2,300 such web addresses have been sealed off from the Internet-using public of Thailand, and that at least 400 more will soon get the same treatment.

The ministry has been devoting increasing energy to the blocking of sites for a number of years, and it was in October last year that a former minister announced the new firewall to stop content deemed critical of the royal family, which apparently takes precedence to pornography or material inciting religious or racial hatred.

But this latest round of censoring comes amid high uncertainty about the country’s future, and together with a flurry of other reports about attempts to curtail free speech in Thailand.

Within the last few weeks, the chief privy councilor reportedly asked the military to monitor and act against websites offensive to the monarchy, which the army chief had already ordered be done anyway; supporters of ousted prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra were accused of committing an offence by placing the royal couple’s image against an inappropriate slogan, and a new criminal complaint has been lodged against a British Broadcasting Corporation correspondent for a report suggesting links between the palace and the crowds that barricaded themselves into Government House and the airports last year.

Then there are opinion pieces like the one in Matichon daily last month urging friends or relatives of someone showing signs of listening to the king’s critics to take the person promptly for psychological treatment.

The suggestion that people showing less than undying gratitude to His Majesty might be deranged would be funny were the author – a former police general – not serious, not writing in a major newspaper and not speaking to deeply entrenched prejudices.

Whereas to people in the West the implication that critics of orthodoxy may be mentally unsound recalls the sinister practices of past decades in the Soviet Union and earlier periods of religious zealotry in Europe and the New World, in Asia it has its origins in ancient India.

Old tales with their genesis in some of the most stratified and hierarchical societies the world has known reiterate how ordinary persons who challenge the established order, who attempt to rise above or move outside the place assigned to them, go crazy in their folly (like the unfortunate character in the cartoon shown above).

These stories and their values continue to weigh heavily on people in countries that have inherited and interpreted them, including Thailand. After all, its king is still the great caste-assigned ruler the Maha Kasatriya, even if millions of his subjects would prefer to live in a country plugged into Sanook.com rather than one anchored to the Indus shoreline.

Bangkok’s blocking of YouTube, Prachatai and The Economist is as much about ancient madness as modern censorship. To get past the latter requires only a little ingenuity and any of the growing number of computer programs designed to befuddle the Net police.

To get over the former requires a rejection of the idea that there remains anyone anywhere who is wholly above criticism. This, surely, is an idea whose time has come and gone.

Abhisit’s maneuvering into the leadership spot – made possible only after military and royalist intrigues and the three-month illegal takeover of the offices that he now occupies – prompted lots of excited talk about nascent change in Thailand’s policies on Burma.

That was never going to happen. At no point in the last two decades has there been a meaningful shift in Bangkok’s approach to dealing with the generals to the west, neither under Abhisit’s Democrat Party or any other. There have been a few changes in style, but none in substance.

This is because the strongest ties binding Thailand’s policies on its neighbor are not from ministerial offices, but from military bases. And as the prime minister owes his job to the people that decide those policies, rather than the electorate, there is no advantage to him if he tries to do things differently.

The strength of these ties could not have been more apparent than in the handling of news that perhaps thousands of people from western Burma travelling to southern Thailand in boats have been repeatedly forced back out to sea since last December.

Hundreds are believed to have died, and those who have made it through have alleged that naval personnel starved and assaulted them. At least one said that sailors murdered some of his companions by tying their arms and legs and throwing them overboard.

Others who received more sympathetic treatment in Indonesian waters confirmed that Thai sailors had boarded their vessels, thrown their food out and destroyed the engines before pushing them away, but that they had managed to survive by making sails from plastic sheets. Those whom Indian vessels lifted from the sea gave similar accounts.

According to some journalists, the revamped Internal Security Operations Command is now handling the hundred or so survivors who are still in Thailand. An Agence France-Presse webpage carried a photograph of the powerful agency’s local commander, Colonel Manas Kongpan, standing on the beach alongside one group.

Manas, a few people may recall, was among three army officers that a court in 2006 found responsible for the deaths of 28 young men at the Krue Se Mosque two years earlier. By law he ought to have had criminal charges pending against him, but instead he is at the forefront of the new government’s response to an international crisis.

One of his other two co-accused in the Krue Se case, Manas’ superior officer General Pallop Pinmanee, has been in and out of the ISOC apparatus for years. The former death-squad commander was close not only with the 2006 coup group, which had favored Abhisit’s unsuccessful bid in the 2007 polls, but also with the ironically named People’s Alliance for Democracy that brought Abhisit to government at the end of last year by shutting down Thailand’s airports.

Meanwhile, navy and army chiefs have been quick to deny all the accounts about the boatloads of people from Burma and have insisted that no inquiries are necessary. The Foreign Ministry has said that it is “verifying the facts.” The prime minister met with human rights defenders and had reportedly promised that events would be investigated, but then quickly back-pedaled, saying that they might have been exaggerated.

When has there ever been a government inquiry into a case of forced repatriation from Thailand? The forcible sending back of people from neighboring countries, in recent decades mostly from Burma, has gone on for a long time with guarantees of impunity for the likes of Manas and the navy personnel involved this time around.

Most incidents have taken place not at sea but on land, often in jungles and remote valleys, far from the beaches where horrified tourists took photographs of the abuse meted out on some of the victims in the last few weeks.

Human rights groups have for years documented cases of villagers – here dozens, there hundreds – being forced back into combat zones, into hunger, disease and danger. Often soldiers have moved these people in trucks from where they have crossed the border to a few miles north or south and then told them to go back. At other times they have simply been told to leave.

One such incident that did attract publicity was the forced repatriation in 1994 of thousands of people from Sangkhlaburi back to a temporary camp on the other side of the border from where they had fled after Burmese army troops had attacked.

Ashley South, a humanitarian aid worker present on the scene, recalled, “Within three days of the attack, Thai authorities were already telling the refugees to return to Burma, which they refused to do.” Eventually, in desperate circumstances and with threats and promises of help if they went away, they were coerced and cajoled into crossing over again.

Defending the de facto policy of forced repatriation, the chief government spokesman said at the time that, “Thailand will provide the necessary humanitarian aid (for asylum-seekers), and we would not send people back across a border if we felt it was not safe for them to go back.”

That was a Democrat Party government. Its chief spokesman? Abhisit Vejjajiva.

The army unit concerned – which had set up an arms depot and allowed the farmers to return to their fields only upon payment of special fees – promptly detained and interrogated four of those who complained. After it got what it wanted from them, it illegally arrested another four, keeping them at its base and allegedly torturing them.

Two were also later released, while the other two were brought to court to be charged. One of them became a witness for the prosecutor, and in the end only one person had a case brought against him.

That person is Ko Zaw Htay, a 43-year-old who had previously been detained over an accidental death on a road being built with forced labor – in breach of a government agreement with the International Labor Organization to stamp out the use of unpaid conscript workers on state projects.

Evidently, the local powers-that-be had it in for Zaw Htay. What really annoyed them was not the new complaint, but the fact that he had supposedly sent video footage of the confiscated land abroad, two-and-a-half minutes of which were broadcast on an overseas news website.

For this, Zaw Htay was charged under the colonial-era Official Secrets Act with approaching a prohibited place and making a record that might be useful to an enemy; or rather, with having someone else do that, even though the law is supposed to apply only to the person committing the act, not an accomplice or backer.

Watching the video (from the four-minute mark, narrative in Burmese) it is hard to see anything that might be useful to an enemy, other than for agricultural purposes. There are farmers tilling their fields, a couple of them describing what has happened since the army turned up, and a red-and-white signboard (above) marked “Army Land: No Trespassing.”

What mattered to the embarrassed officer and local authorities was not that some remarkable military secret may have snuck out from under the crops, but that the bubble in which their world is contained had been broken open, its contents made visible to the outside. A little bit of rural Burma, which no one who didn’t live there had known or cared about, had been projected around the globe without their prior approval.

This fear of enclosed spaces being penetrated and made knowable and understandable to people in other places is one of the features of the police state mentality. It is a fear in which that which is done is more disturbing than that which is revealed. Never mind what is shown or said, it is the fact of showing and saying that is offensive.

This fear has governed Burma for half a century. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s General Ne Win presided over what was characterized as a hermit state, where all types of movement inside and outside the country were extremely limited and any unauthorized contact with the world beyond could conceivably be punished.

When a young man was imprisoned for his role in anti-government rallies in 1974, for instance, the court handing down the verdict emphasized that his crime was to have sent a letter about it, in English, to the United Nations. If the act of protest was bad, telling someone in New York about it in a foreign language was worse.

Similarly, people who allegedly sent news abroad during the 2007 protests have been pursued and imprisoned with equal vigor as those who led the marches. And comedian Zarganar and human rights defender Myint Aye are facing long jail terms for talking too openly and too truthfully about the official indifference they saw in the wake of last year’s cyclone.

Some commentators who don’t know Burma have talked about it as if it is still sealed off, trapped on another planet beyond email, digital recording devices and the tiny objects on which people now store libraries of data. That land does not exist.

With thousands of Internet cafes around the country crammed with teenagers, periodicals full of news about the latest products from Japan or Korea, and even places like Natmauk coming onto computer screens, the bubble in which Burma is enclosed is psychological, not technological. It persists because of official fear about people like Zaw Htay.

As the authorities struggle to keep track of adversaries armed with new gadgets, there are certain to be many more cases brought to the courts in which all the prosecutor can say is that the accused is somehow to blame for sending something somewhere.

In Zaw Htay’s case, the police and army never found the video recorder that he allegedly gave to his friend to record the confiscated farmlands, and the CDs shown in evidence against him were not brought from his house but downloaded from a website. Still, for official fear, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison for his two-and-a-half minutes of video.

With technology and its users getting further and further ahead of the people responsible for keeping Burma’s official secrets, the struggle to contain them is going to get harder and more dangerous for everyone determined to break them. But they are going with the tide, and they will succeed eventually.

Around the world, Thailand’s legal, political and social developments in the 1990s were greeted with applause, and its people in Geneva could sit comfortably, confident that their country would be held up as an example of somewhere with an improved record, even as their neighbors were being singled out for the opposite reason.

How times have changed. This week, the Asian Legal Resource Center submitted a statement to the Human Rights Council (above) that has painted the bleakest picture yet of denied rights and declining rule of law in Thailand during the past few years.

According to the Hong Kong-based group, Thailand is now in real danger of turning back into an internal-security state. The center’s indicators include the repeated overthrow of elected governments by antidemocratic forces, large-scale public criminal activity with impunity, Internet censorship and the lese-majesty witch-hunt, threats to human rights defenders, and forced repatriation and murder on the high seas.

The first item on the center’s list is the removal from office of Samak Sundaravej’s and Somchai Wongsawat’s governments through court orders based on bizarre clauses in the army-sponsored 2007 Constitution. Neither of them, the group underlines, was a friend of human rights, citing Samak’s fantastic denials of historical fact on the Thammasat massacre and Tak Bai killings. But, it adds, that both were pushed out, and the manner in which each was pushed, indicate that “electoral politics in Thailand have been sidelined and that the senior judiciary has been made into a tool for conservative political forces and is not at all independent.”

The second of the center’s indicators concerns the military-style Government House and airport takeovers at the end of 2008. “The group spearheading them,” it continues, “Ran a de facto police force whose members openly and covertly carried and used weapons, including guns, explosives, knives and an array of blunt instruments, and which assaulted and illegally confined numerous persons, and is believed to have been responsible for at least one killing.”

Despite all this, there have so far been no reports of credible criminal inquiries, and the prime minister’s excusing himself from responsibility by saying that it is a job for the police and courts is patently ridiculous. Not only can he have special teams take up these cases, but he is duty-bound to do as much given the scale of the events and their consequences. But with the latest news that he and his staff have attended the funeral ceremony for a member of the group responsible for the takeovers, it looks unlikely that he is going to take this duty seriously.

In its third point, the legal center takes up the increasingly hot topic of people charged for commenting about the royal family, and the closely-related issue of online censorship. It cites a number of widely-reported cases and expresses special concern over the new “Protect the King” website operating on the parliament’s server, which is encouraging citizens to make complaints about others whom they think have committed an offence against the monarchy [English text of PtK website].

Fourth, the group describes the growing harassment of rights defenders in Thailand, along with the systemic failure to solve killings and disappearances of activists in previous years, which “are not sporadic but are a part of the institutional make up of the internal-security state”.

Most recently, after the Internal Security Operations Command said that insurgents in the south of the country were using human rights agencies to spread hatred among local people, soldiers and police raided the office of one well-known group. The command’s subsequent claims that the raid was part of a search for an alleged terrorist hiding in the area are unbelievable: the man they were purportedly hunting could not have hidden himself in the document files and computer drives that they went through for some three hours.

Fifth and finally, the Asian Legal Resource Centre has raised the widely-reported inhuman treatment of hundreds of persons travelling across the Bay of Bengal who passed into or near Thailand’s waters only to be forced back out to sea again, many to their deaths. After weeks of blanket denial, the prime minister’s recent allowance that there may have been some such incidents is not only morally bankrupt but also holds no hope that the full story will ever be revealed. His qualifying of every remark and his insistence in an interview that these people about whom he knows nothing are “not refugees, just illegal immigrants” are the words of a man trying to squirm out of a tight spot rather than trying to do something about a matter of life or death.

All this and more is being put before the current sitting of the Human Rights Council. Ironically, back in 2006 before the coup Thailand tried to get a seat on the council. It failed then not because of poor diplomacy, as it claimed, but because after five years of government under Thaksin Shinawatra its rights reputation was in the gutter. It is not in the gutter any more. Now it’s in the sewer.

To get it out again requires courage to admit the facts, tell the truth and do something about it. Neither Thailand’s mealy-mouthed prime minister nor the phalanx of generals at his rear can be expected to do this, which is why it falls to everyone else concerned about the defense of human rights in Thailand to speak and act instead.

Not only in the worst-hit delta areas but also in places close to Rangoon people are suffering from illnesses brought on by dirty water, lack of food and exposure to the elements. On Wednesday, a resident speaking to the Voice of America Burmese Service described the situation:

“In Thanlyin, 43-year-old Ko Aung Kyaw Moe died from cholera, as did a small girl in another village on the ninth. She was in the morgue. Also in Twente, I heard it of two girls. Then in Hpayagyigone village of Thanlyin an entire family of five died. And there’s around seven or eight sick people in the hospital.”

This account may or may not be fully accurate, but it is anyhow backed by many other similar reports from the disaster zones. Together they affirm that people are today dying of what can only be described as the most preventable of deaths — deaths due not to a lack of knowhow, resources or concern, but to an excess of obduracy in a military regime with a record of unremitting and shameless disregard for basic human rights and absolute minimum universal standards.

Under international law, the right to clean drinking water, a decent place to stay and adequate food fall into a special domain that places both positive and negative duties upon governments. What this means is that states must do some things but not others to make sure these rights are upheld.

More specifically, in trade jargon, states are obliged to respect, protect and fulfill fundamental rights. What these three requirements entail, in reverse order, is that authorities must assist people who cannot provide for themselves, must defend the vulnerable from others who may undermine their ability to do so, and at the very least must not do anything to cause people to go hungry, thirsty or homeless.

Often, the problems lie in getting governments to do things that they have not, perhaps because of a lack of money or people, a lack of interest, or maybe because of discriminatory policies. But in certain circumstances, such as those in Burma today, the problem may lie more in getting a government to do nothing at all.

People living in Burma are largely self-reliant. They have to be. By modern standards they generally expect very little of their administrators, and are satisfied if left alone to get by as best they can. Unfortunately, it rarely happens that they are unimpeded, and people who are already hard pressed to meet their own needs are often called upon to contribute to those of the state. Protecting and fulfilling fundamental rights have never been among the regime’s strong points.

Still, never has it sunk so far in its blatant disrespect for the lives and wellbeing of its reluctant subjects than in the past week. Its audacious blockading of cyclone-stricken areas to proffered vital relief, especially technical assistance, far surpasses any of its former acts of self-interested unkindness. Its shabby treatment of United Nations agencies and other reputed international bodies at the cost of its own citizens’ lives has shocked even those used to dealing with it and its agents, as well as those used to hearing of its more routine excesses.

The government’s behavior is also coming as a shock to its own people. In a broadcast on the exile Democratic Voice of Burma radio, a crowd of outraged townsfolk in Laputta this week shouted and cried with palpable anger that approaching two weeks on from the cyclone there are still dead bodies floating in canals, that they have been told to leave shelters and go back to homes that no longer exist, and that they have seen aid being delivered but have not themselves received one iota of it.

The exact number of dead from Cyclone Nargis will never be known. It claimed just too many victims across too wide an area of too disorganized a country for anyone to ever be able to calculate it with certainty. But what can be said with 100 percent certainty is that the number tomorrow will be higher than it was today. And the number next week will be far higher still if, one way or another, help doesn’t get through to those who are in grave danger of dying preventable deaths.

The consequences of doing nothing, or of being unable to do anything, are for the cyclone’s immediate victims clear enough. The dramatic and lasting damage that will be caused to their entire country and its already battered economy can also be foreseen. But beyond these, the effects on the whole world, particularly its disaster relief and human rights movements, should be of special concern.

Failure to address this disaster effectively will establish a monstrous precedent with lasting unwelcome results not only for the people of Burma but for everyone, everywhere. It will be a massive political, legal and humanitarian defeat for us all, but above all, a moral defeat from which it will not be easy to recover. For the sake of Nargis’s victims, their fellow countrymen and women, and for the sake of each and every one of us, this cannot be allowed to happen.

The report follows Tomas Ojea Quintana’s second visit to the country since he came into the job last year, at the end of which the regime even allowed him a press conference inside the Rangoon airport, rather than back in Bangkok.

His careful remarks on the “challenging” rights situation were quoted in the state media, which also gave what by its standards was an unusually detailed account of his meetings and travels in February.

In the following days it also made out that the release of thousands of prisoners, timed to coincide with Quintana’s departure, had something to do with his visit rather than overcrowded jails.

Contrary to official news reports, the rights representative did not get everything he wanted. The government declined to let him meet with political party leaders. Because of this, U Win Tin, former long-term prisoner and National League for Democracy executive council member, refused to meet with Quintana individually.

And the rebel Karen National Union was irked that Quintana went to see leaders of splinter units that have gone over to the government side but didn’t call on it. As the envoy’s remit is to study and report on human rights abuse perhaps it should be relieved that he did not pay a call.

Ironically, the people whom Quintana could not or did not see got more press outside the country than those whom he did. Among the latter were the chief justice, attorney general, bar council members, home affairs minister and police chief.

These meetings are important because they speak to the new approach that Quintana has taken to the mandate, which distinguishes him from his predecessors.

The current envoy, the fourth since 1992, is the first to put the institutional features of rights abuse in Burma before its mere description. Whereas most of the work done by the other three was limited to documenting and classifying abuse, he has already gone a step further in having a go at understanding and addressing some of its systemic aspects.

Quintana met with the three key figures in the criminal justice system: the top cop, top prosecutor and top judge. Of course, the top cop is an army officer, and the top prosecutor and judge are both army appointees. They, like all functionaries in Burma, are not independent. But they and their agencies provide important services to the regime, and understanding what they do and how they do it is critical to understanding how abuses occur and what can be done about them.

It is meaningless just to say, like some critics did after Quintana’s visit, that there is no rule of law in Burma and until there is, human rights can’t be protected. This blanket response to the country’s overwhelming problems defeats any initiative to try something new even before it’s begun.

The rule of law won’t arrive in a box on the doorstep of an elected government. It’s not something that a country exclusively has or hasn’t. The institutions that in principle should be defending human rights in Burma need to be carefully studied and described with a view to the future, even if there won’t be any dramatic change in the present. And as the U.N. expert on human rights assigned to the country, Quintana is the man for the job.

In the place of mere rhetoric on rule of law and human rights issues in Burma we need an informed and substantive debate. Instead of bluster on political prisoners we need useful knowledge on the persons, bodies, laws and procedures responsible for their imprisonment. Instead of isolating those aspects of the state responsible for the worst abuses of rights, we need to identify the commonalities between the case of a person wrongly jailed for sedition and one wrongly jailed for fraud.

Even then, there will not be any magical solutions. So long as the army remains in power, other parts of government will remain under its orders and abuse will be rampant. But a more comprehensive approach to human rights can but contribute to a more intelligent approach to the country as a whole. And a more intelligent approach to the country as a whole may open spaces to negotiate change that years of narrow political dialogue, or so-called dialogue, have not.

Rather than complaining that the U.N. envoy met with one group but not with another, or that of the thousands of prisoners freed last month only a couple of dozen were political detainees, critics should take more heed of what fresh ideas and methods the fourth representative on human rights in Burma is bringing to the mandate and give him more time to try them out.

Everyone should lay off Quintana and see if he can—to paraphrase Win Tin—tell us something more than what we already know: that Burma is full of human rights abuse.