Facing a Fraying World
Coming Soon…
“What I bring to the work at Fortify Rights— and I work on Myanmar in particular— is that idea that we must document so that these things can be addressed in the future.”
Patrick Phongsathorn is a human rights advocate working as an advocacy specialist at Fortify Rights. With Thai and Irish–South African family roots and a childhood on the outskirts of London, he brings a cosmopolitan lens to Southeast Asia’s conflicts. His work sits at the junction of documentation, law, and persuasion, pairing legal rigor with a practical understanding of how bureaucracies, courts, and ministries actually move.
Patrick grew up in a household where global events were regular conversation. The 1990s left a strong imprint: the wars in the former Yugoslavia, the Rwanda genocide, South Africa’s democratic turn, and a moment when the United Nations and the larger international community seemed capable of both moral clarity and muscular peacekeeping. Those stories made international affairs feel close at hand. His father’s work as a doctor and his mother’s as a nurse initially pulled him toward medicine, but the UK’s early specialization pushed him into science subjects that never fit. After poor results and blunt feedback from teachers, he restarted his final year with politics, sociology, religious studies, and French and found his stride.
The School for Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) gave him a home that was both international and engaged. He then sought a deliberate counterbalance with a Master’s Degree at Sciences Po in Paris in Human Rights and Humanitarian Action. That program was practitioner‑heavy—shaped by people like Ronnie Brauman—and trained students to hold moral urgency and methodological discipline at the same time. In class they pressure‑tested arguments from multiple angles, which forced students to interrogate law, narrative, and political trade‑offs in real time.
Patrick learned the craft by doing. Early on he interned at Human Rights Watch on immigration detention and the situation of refugee children in Thailand, while also supporting a human‑rights policy group within the UK Labour Party. But he wanted work closer to the ground, so he moved with his partner to Timor‑Leste, joining the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in a tiny office that covered everything from labor migration to counter‑trafficking to border systems. Working alongside a government serving over one million people taught him how policy translates into everyday practice. From there he went to Lebanon with UNHCR during the height of the Syria displacement crisis, handling external relations and fundraising within what was then the UN’s largest operation. The scale and pace were enormous, and the job demanded deft coordination with donors and the Lebanese government.
Seeking a durable base, he and his spouse relocated to Thailand. After a stint in anti‑corruption work with a Thai foundation connected to his family, Patrick joined Fortify Rights in 2019. From here, he started by building monitoring and evaluation systems to track outcomes and impact, then moved into advocacy. Today he both leads advocacy and trains colleagues and partners in the nuts and bolts of influence— structuring legislative submissions, planning meetings with officials, sharpening messaging, and stress‑testing evidence.
Experience has refined his outlook. He still carries a fire for justice, but he has traded youthful certainty for disciplined empathy—the willingness to understand how a hospital administrator under strain, a local official balancing fragile bargains, or a displaced family piecing together survival experiences the same crisis. That empathy does not blunt legal standards; in his view, it sharpens them. He notes that Fortify’s method is to investigate carefully, apply international law rigorously, and publish only what meets a high standard of proof. Internal debates are common, and the bar for naming perpetrators is kept high because these findings feed both immediate advocacy and later legal processes.
Patrick describes his advocacy as being grounded in local expertise and consent. “The most important people that I’ve spoken to about Myanmar are Myanmar people,” he says. For him this is both ethic and method: investigations begin with those living the crisis; local researchers and community leaders shape questions and priorities; their testimony anchors the evidentiary record; and external allies use their access to clear political space and translate findings into consequences. Nothing meaningful about Myanmar should be decided without Myanmar voices at the table, and the credibility of any accountability effort depends on that center of gravity.
Patrick’s comments on the current conflict Myanmar follow two intertwined tracks. First, minimize harm now: document violations, help generate pressure that can curb the worst abuses, and back local protection strategies. Second, make justice possible later: assemble credible case files to support accountability when political conditions allow. He believes that leaving mass violations unaddressed simply stores up future instability. “If you don’t reconcile the injustices that people face, then they will come back,” Patrick says. “They will bubble under the surface, and they will come back.”
Looking at the pattern of air attacks across Karen, Karenni, and Chin areas, Patrick notes these represent indiscriminate strikes on civilians and protected sites, and often spike when the junta suffers battlefield losses. The facts are stark, and he states them plainly: “What we have documented is a systematic pattern of indiscriminate attacks through airstrikes that have claimed hundreds of civilian lives, very young children, very elderly people, and internally displaced people. These airstrikes have targeted churches harboring refugees, IDP camps, hospitals and schools.” International supply chains, especially aviation fuel, enable these assaults, and Fortify Rights has been pushing for years for an arms embargo and coordinated restrictions on aviation fuel, paired with serious pursuit of individual command responsibility. Non‑binding resolutions are not enough; states need to translate statements into enforcement— an outcome which has sadly still not been achieved.
“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,” Patrick says. “International Law is very, very clear about that.” He adds that these constraints, even when conflict is most chaotic, are even more essential to follow. “There must remain limits. There must remain law, even in the chaos of war. There must there must be limits to what actors can do.” Those limits bind all sides and sit at the heart of his advocacy.
While Fortify Rights has been documenting the Myanmar military’s crimes, the organization has also called out grave abuses by some anti‑junta forces. Patrick tells how early in the conflict, the team investigated a massacre carried out by a Karen unit; more recently it has cataloged serious abuses by the Arakan Army (AA) against Rohingya civilians, including bombardment of civilian areas, beheadings to spread terror, arbitrary detention, and torture. He acknowledges the pushback their reporting has brought, but insists that ignoring such crimes would betray the ethos of a rights‑based future. He adds that Fortify continues to engage resistance actors when there is a chance to improve conduct and facilitate cooperation with future investigations.
The same holds true for the National Unity Government and its aligned People’s Defense Forces, both of which have responsibilities under the laws of war, just as the military does. If they expect recognition in a future federal democracy, they will need to meet those obligations now. The same is true for ethnic resistance organizations and other local forces. Accountability cannot be selective if the goal is to break the country’s cycle of impunity.
Interestingly, Patrick describes how these legal pathways are not simply an ends to themselves, but are in fact situated within a broader justice strategy. Documentation must feed mechanisms that exist now and those that may become available: national courts using universal jurisdiction, international bodies, and UN processes. Patrick notes the reality of the uneven political will at the top of the UN system and the broader drift of multilateral institutions, even as technical human‑rights bodies keep reporting. He favors sustained pressure for a Security Council arms embargo and complementary actions by states, and also flags the utility of the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) process as a near‑term opportunity to set baselines, extract specific commitments, and create benchmarks that civil society can use to hold states to account.
Patrick is equally blunt about the junta’s plans for elections. He cautions that balloting under emergency rule is a façade designed to consolidate military power and legitimize territorial control. Without sustained external pressure, communities that resist will be “pacified” by bombardment and terror. He is also critical of the role of neighboring states—Thailand, India, China—in enabling normalization, and of ASEAN’s diluted five‑point consensus that never yielded consequences for non‑compliance.
On cross‑border protection, Patrick is equally wary of proposals for “safe zones.” The historical record is bleak; Srebrenica is the cautionary example of what happens when protection is promised but not guaranteed. A more realistic path is a genuine Thai asylum system that documents and protects refugees throughout the country. He describes Thailand’s existing National Screening Mechanism (NSM) as a sieve that grants protected status to very few people, leaving most refugees undocumented and thus exploitable in a gray and black economy that the country would be better off regularizing. A functioning asylum system would protect people, reduce abuse, and actually help the formal economy.
Fortify Rights is also focused on ‘the day after.’ In other words, there must be no victors’ justice and no collective punishment following the expected fall of the military. Durable peace in a post-military Myanmar requires processes that distinguish individual guilt from group identity, and institutions that can investigate, charge, and fairly try those responsible for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. Without that reckoning, the country will relapse into violence.
When asked what a future elected government should prioritize, he goes back to first principles. A comprehensive human‑rights agenda should anchor the governing program—civil and political rights, yes, and also health, education, livelihoods, worker protections, mobility, communications, and even leisure, which signals restored dignity and normalcy. Pair that agenda with a credible accountability strategy and the administrative capacity to implement it, and only then will promises translate into lived change for people who have endured extraordinary harm.
As the post–Cold War order frays and global institutions lose coherence, Patrick treats Myanmar not only as a national struggle but as a test of whether law can still restrain power in a fragmenting world. Which is why he references a warning that doubles as counsel for anyone tempted to look away: “If you’re not interested in international politics, international politics will be interested in you.”