Thai central bank intervenes in currency market after baht hits 10-year high
The Bank of Thailand intervened in the currency market Tuesday to restrain the rise of the baht after it touched a 10-year high, Gov. Tarisa Watanagase said.

The baht closed Tuesday at 33.48 to the dollar, just off an early high of 33.47, its highest level since September 1997. The baht had closed at 33.78 Monday.

Tarisa said the baht’s recent strength has been due mostly to portfolio investments, but its rise Tuesday was due to misunderstandings about new rules allowing certain nonresidents to tap onshore baht liquidity.

“The baht today was pressured by exporters’ panic selling (of dollars) which caused an abnormal move in the baht. Exporters should not panic,” Tarisa said at a briefing for reporters.

The Bank of Thailand said Monday it would create a one-month window starting July 16 for foreign businesses and banks to borrow baht within the country to roll over hedged offshore positions.

The baht trades at a higher level outside Thailand because some foreign investors want to avoid a 30 percent withholding requirement imposed in December on many types of inflows. The central bank imposed those capital controls to stem the baht’s appreciation.

So far this year, the baht has risen 7 percent against the dollar, compared with appreciation by regional peers between around 1 percent and 10 percent, Tarisa said.

Upward pressure on the baht is likely to ease because portfolio inflows can’t go on forever, and dollar buying by importers is expected to rise in the coming months, Tarisa said earlier Tuesday in a live interview on a local business news radio program.

“At a certain point where stock prices have risen enough, such flows will surely slow down,” she said.

Thailand’s stock market has risen to its highest in more than 10 years.

Countries in the Asia Pacific are being told to establish sub-regional human rights mechanisms to improve rights promotion and protection, given the failure to reach regional consensus on the issue.

“Reaching consensus over the establishment of a human rights mechanism to cover a region stretching from West Asia to the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean remains challenging,” United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour said Tuesday.

She was addressing participants of the 14th annual workshop for the Framework on Regional Cooperation for the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights in the Asia-Pacific Region, being held in Nusa Dua from July 10-12.

“In this context, we may wish to reorient our strategy and seek to work more at the sub-regional level in pursuit of our overall goal of a regional framework. I therefore would like to suggest that we reconfigure our approach from an annual, regional workshop, to a number of smaller and sub-regional gatherings.”

Arbour said Southeast Asian countries would serve as an inspiration for other countries in the Asia Pacific, given their commitment to the immediate establishment of the ASEAN Human Rights Mechanism.

The Cebu Declaration on the Blueprint of the ASEAN Charter, which was unanimously endorsed by the leaders of the 10 countries in the regional grouping earlier this year, showed an emerging consensus on the establishment of rights mechanisms.

She is optimistic as other regions have shown improvement in dealing with human rights issues, with the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) adopting its own charter, the Arab League revising and strengthening its former charter and the South Pacific Forum developing its own action plan to address common rights challenges.

The Asia Pacific has lagged behind other regions in addressing human rights with no agreed upon human rights mechanisms, while many countries in the region do not have effective rights bodies.

Europe has the European Court of Human Rights, Africa the African Commission on Human and People’s Rights and America has the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and Court of Human Rights.

Indonesia’s permanent representative to the United Nations, Makarim Wibisono, welcomed Arbour’s suggestion, saying the diversity of Asia-Pacific countries has hindered talks on the creation of a single human rights mechanism.

“We hope the meeting will generate ideas on the establishment of sub-regional human rights mechanisms,” he said.

Besides issues regarding the enhancement of rights institutions in the region, Makarim said the workshop would highlight the need to shift the human rights paradigm from the protection of civil-political rights to poverty reduction.

“It’s been decades since the last world war and we are still witnessing third of the world’s population living on less than a dollar a day. Civil-political and socio-economic approaches to human rights issues should be carried out together.

“The government and NGOs will have to pay more attention to problems arising from poverty,” he said.

Arbour said human rights courts could play a critical role in enforcing economic, social and cultural rights, providing relief to individuals, and ensuring that governments implement constitutionally guaranteed economic, social and cultural rights, as has happened in India and Sri Lanka.

“Human rights and poverty reduction are both a cause and a consequence of poverty,” she said.

The Indonesian Foreign Ministry’s director general for multilateral affairs, Rezlan Ishar Jenie, said the workshop would not discuss rights abuses happening in the region, including the latest report by Human Rights Watch on Papua or the murder of human rights activist Munir.

Makarim, however, said “the forum provides the possibility for the discussion of those cases”.

Commission for Missing Persons and Victims of Violence coordinator Usman Hamid, who is attending the seminar, said he would meet with Arbour to discuss the Munir case and other cases of rights abuses in Indonesia.

He hoped the UN official would press the Indonesian government to resolve the cases.