Prateep Ungsongtham Hata

Women's Legal Rights Leader - standing up for human rights

Starting with a school she ran as a teenager in her family's tiny house in the Khlong Toey slum, Prateep Unsongtham Hata became one of Thailand's most visible activists, defending slum dwellers' rights to education and basic services. Klong Toey is the largest of some 300 slums around Bangkok, housing over 800,000 persons, half of them children. With in-kind help from neighbors and donations she raised through her Duang Prateep Foundation, the slum eventually had a seven-building Pattana Village Community School with a small clinic staffed on weekends by volunteer doctors and nurses from city hospitals.

One of the leaders of the opposition to the military dictatorship that governed Thailand in the 1990s, Hata won a seat in the Senate in Thailand's first free election in 2000. The name "Duang Prateep" means "flame of hope" and this flame is the foundation's symbol, Hata says.

Standing up for the principles of the Universal Declaration
Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights affirms the rights of children to "special care and assistance." Children's rights were further strengthened through the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), which nearly every country in the world has signed and ratified.

Learn more:
>>Wikipedia: Prateep Ungsongtham Hata
>>Duang Prateep Foundation

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