This time, the Foreign Ministry took on the supposedly patriotic role of defending the country's honour. A ministry spokesman on Friday mounted an impassioned defence of Thailand's human rights record, calling the US assessment improper, unbalanced and incomplete. He said Thailand did not appreciate a friendly country like the US keeping dossiers on how other countries dealt with human rights-related issues in the first place.

The spokesman objected particularly to the imposition of US norms and standards in passing judgement on other countries' human rights situations. Being diplomatic, he stopped short of telling the US government to look at its own human rights record, made notorious by its soldiers' ill treatment of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

But the message to the US was clear: Thailand considers the release of the annual human rights report by the State Department a "not constructive" exercise that creates bitter feeling.

The US has listed a wide range of human rights abuses in Thailand in its latest report, including police brutality, arbitrary arrests, intimidation of the press, violence against female trafficking victims, discrimination against minorities including hill tribes, ill treatment of foreign migrant workers, and, believe it or not, poor prison conditions.

The report cites complaints by legal organisations about police torture of suspects and the use of beatings to obtain confessions.

The Foreign Ministry's reaction to the report was understandable given the fact that Thaksin is an elected prime minister who is extremely sensitive to any kind of criticism. It must be noted that before Thaksin came to power five years ago, Thailand had never officially complained about such reports ever since they were first published in 1979.

Previous governments dealt with the reports in a mature way. They treated the reports as a benchmark viewed from a Western perspective. In fact the report, which covers more than 130 countries, is drafted mostly by US diplomats based in various capitals in which the US has diplomatic missions.

It must be said that in general the report, required by the US Congress, is accurate and comprehensive and makes for interesting reading to anyone concerned about the human rights situation in countries around the world. Indeed, these reports are even considered indispensable as sources of reliable information, particularly in undemocratic countries ruled by repressive regimes that do not allow a free press.

Unsurprisingly, the more repressive a government is the more aggressive its response to the US report becomes.

Any open-minded, sensible person would regard the US report on human rights as providing some interesting points to ponder, knowing full well that it reflects only the US State Department's perception and assessment.

As such, it is impossible for the report to be absolutely balanced, complete or even completely accurate. The way the information is compiled, selected, interpreted and analysed can be improved. But writing the report to suit every government's sensitivities or unrealistic expectations of flattery is never the intention of the report's authors.

If the Thai government or Thai readers of the report are open-minded enough, then the report can be useful because it tells us how others view our society so that we can try to improve ourselves if we want to.

Inaccuracies in the report should be pointed out and clarified as the Foreign Ministry is rightly doing, but to say that nothing good could possibly come from the report is definitely untrue. After all, human rights is no longer an alien Western concept but a universally accepted standard with certain variances and different points of emphasis.