Recent reports on investigations into the New Year’s Eve bombings in Bangkok have revealed the extent to which the rule of law is now under threat in Thailand. While the army has announced that it will conduct its own investigations to clear military officers being investigated in connection with the attacks, the police have apparently reverted to doing what they do best: torturing detainees. An article in The Nation newspaper of January 25 said that one of the suspects had “hurt himself badly after becoming stressed by a long interrogation session”, supposedly by driving his head into a wall. A senior member of the junta, General Saprang Kalayanamitr, has meanwhile reportedly said that he will have any army officer involved in the bombings “beheaded”. General Sonthi Boonyarathglin, the regime’s chief, has reassured the public that this is unlikely to happen as he believes that “no soldiers have done anything wrong”, by virtue of their supposedly not having confessed, and because keeping munitions in one’s home is apparently commonplace among soldiers in Thailand. However, the police chief has been warned that it may be his head to roll if it is found that the accused are mere scapegoats.
In fact, Thailand’s investigative system is characterised by the use of scapegoats. Were General Sonthi to apply the criterion for the innocence of his own men (that they said so) to everyone else in the country, the courts and prisons would soon be emptied. Among those released would be victims of torture and forced confession, fabricated evidence, faked documents and other gross breaches of procedure and abuses of human rights. Late last year a senior bureaucrat acknowledged that at least 30 per cent of criminal cases lodged in Thailand’s courts are without substance: anecdotal evidence suggests that a large number of them are deliberately concocted, not merely due to negligence or incompetence. However, the systemic problems in the policing, prosecutions and laws that allow for the easy arrest of scapegoats and dragging out of trials have never been properly addressed.
In this case, the accused have already been pronounced innocent because they are army officers. The case has been thoroughly perverted from the start by intense conflicts between and among military and police agencies, as well as by the usual preference for collaring suspects and squeezing some sort of confession out–rather than scientific methods of investigation–and the clear indication given to the police before any proper investigation was conducted that they were to pin blame for the bombs on people connected to the former prime minister, not southern insurgents as others have alleged. The mistake of the police may have been not that they went after scapegoats but that they went after the wrong scapegoats.
The point is that neither General Sonthi nor the armed forces should be involved in any of this. It is the job of the police to investigate, of the prosecutor to review that investigation, and of the courts to decide on anything submitted by the prosecutor. General Sonthi’s pre-emptive remarks on the innocence of the accused military officers in this case speak perfectly to the utter contempt with which his regime holds judicial process, and its sheer ignorance of even the most basic principles of administration of justice. As a result, he has undermined not only this case but also further diminished the role of the courts, prosecution, investigating agencies and other bodies.
The greatest damage done to Thailand by the September 19 military coup has been to its judicial institutions. While the interim prime minister has rightly said that the former government was responsible for a “rapid deterioration” in the rule of law in Thailand, nothing done by that administration can compare to the last four months, during which time the junta has abrogated the constitution, shut down and reinvented a higher court, reorganised investigative agencies under its command, sidelined senior figures associated with the previous administration and appointed its own people in their stead, and wantonly interfered in the work of judges, police, prosecutors and bureaucrats for its own purposes.
In neighbouring Burma, the judicial system has long been so completely compromised by successive military administrations that a United Nations expert has referred to it as a country under the “un-rule of law”. Thailand’s own military regime is now pushing its country in the same direction, back to a pre-1990s model of government consisting of bogus constitutionalism, subordinated law-enforcement officers and tightly-restrained courts.
The Asian Human Rights Commission again calls upon the lawyers, judges, journalists, human rights defenders and other concerned persons throughout Thailand to fight against the direction in which their country is being pulled. For the sake not of Thailand but for the whole of Asia, resist the movement towards the un-rule of law before it is too late. Whether or not the country was facing an imminent threat to its very integrity before September 19, as claimed by the generals, is debatable. But it certainly is now.
