Facing a Fraying World

Episode #453: Patrick Phongsathorn is a human rights advocate and Fortify Rights advocacy specialist working on Myanmar. Raised near London by a Thai–Irish–South African family, he pairs legal rigor with practical savvy about how ministries, courts, and donors move. After abandoning an early push toward medicine, Patrick rerouted into politics and human rights, studying at SOAS and Sciences Po’s Human Rights and Humanitarian Action program. He learned by doing: Human Rights Watch work on detention and refugee children; IOM in TimorLeste’s smallstate bureaucracy; UNHCR in Lebanon at the height of the Syria crisis. After settlingin Thailand, he joined Fortify Rights in 2019, built monitoring systems, and now leads advocacy while training partners to craft evidencedriven strategies. Patrick’s approach is simple and demanding: investigate carefully, argue from law, and listen first. As he puts it, “the most important people that I’ve spoken to about Myanmar are Myanmar people.” In Myanmar he sees a twotrack mission— minimize harm now and make justice possible later— because “if you don’t reconcile the injustices that people face, then they will come back.” Fortify Rights has documented a pattern of indiscriminate airstrikes on civilians and protected sites—churches, IDP camps, hospitals, schools—often rising when the junta loses ground. Patrickcalls for an arms embargo and restrictions on aviation fuel alongside individual command accountability. The red lines are nonnegotiable: “It’s never right to bomb a hospital, it’s never right to bomb a school, it’s never right to kill civilians in times of war.” Accountability, he insists, binds all parties, including the NUG, PDFs, and ethnic forces. He is also skeptical of sham elections and “safe zones,” urging instead a real Thai asylum system and sustained international pressure through the UN and universaljurisdiction cases. He also reflects on ‘the day after’ the military’s anticipated defeat, noting that they must avoid victors’ justice while building institutions that can fairly try atrocity crimes. And as the global order frays, he reminds that Myanmar is a test of whether law can still restrain power, reminding listeners that “even if you’re not interested in international politics, international politics will be interested in you.”