Thailand’s main opposition party has defended its decision to support amendments to the country’s contentious lese-majeste law, saying that it was well within its constitutional rights to seek changes to any legislation.
Last week, the National Anti-Corruption Commission (NACC) indicted 44 former members of the dissolved Move Forward Party (MFP) for sponsoring a bill to amend Article 112 of the Criminal Code, which criminalizes critical comments about the country’s monarchy.
Speaking to reporters yesterday, Natthaphong Ruengpanyawut, the head of the People’s Party, the MFP’s successor party, insisted that proposing an amendment to a law was well within lawmakers’ rights.
“Proposing a bill falls under a lawmaker’s authority. It does not violate any law or ethical standard,” he said, according to a report in The Nation.
Natthaphong said that the People’s Party had already assembled a legal team to respond to the individual allegations. He also called on the NACC to maintain a fair, transparent approach, avoiding any double standards or unnecessary haste in the process.
The amendment of Article 112, which carries punishments of up to 15 years in prison, has become a focus of Thai democrats and progressives, especially since 2020 and 2021, when thousands of young Thais, radicalized by the banning of the Future Forward party, the predecessor to the MFP and People’s Party, staged large demonstrations in Bangkok and other Thai cities. In addition to calling for the resignation of then Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha, the protests openly breached the taboo against discussing the role of the Thai monarchy in the country’s politics.
This has morphed naturally into attempts to alter the lese-majeste law, which these critics say has been used to silence legitimate dissent and forestall any public debate about the monarchy’s power and prerogatives, and the unequal distributions of wealth and power that these help to underpin.
Since the 2020-21 protests, the Thai establishment has sought to reinstate the political taboo against any critical discussion of the monarchy. It has wielded Article 112 prosecutions to silence scores of leaders and participants in the 2020-21 protests; at least 274 people faced lese-majeste charges as of September, according to the advocacy group Thai Lawyers for Human Rights. It has also pursued anyone advocating the removal or amendment of the lese-majeste law.
In August of last year, the MFP was disbanded by the Constitutional Court over its promise to amend Article 112 ahead of the 2023 general election. (The party ended up coming first in the election, but was blocked from forming government after the parliament, stacked with military appointees, refused to approve its candidate for prime minister.) The Constitutional Court had ruled previously that the MFP’s promise to amend the law amounted to an attempt to overthrow the nation’s system of constitutional monarchy.
The MFP quickly reconstituted itself as the People’s Party, but the new party has come under scrutiny over the Article 112 issue. Twenty-five of the People’s Party’s 143 MPs are among the 44 former MFP parliamentarians who have been indicted by the NACC; the remainder include former MFP executives such as Pita Limjaroenrat who were disqualified from politics for 10 years when the party was disbanded by the Constitutional Court last year.
If the NACC finds that the 44 former MFP lawmakers breached ethical standards, the Bangkok Post explains, the case will be submitted to the Supreme Court for Holders of Political Positions. If found guilty there, “they could forfeit their positions as MPs and be banned from running in elections.”
In a Facebook post on Friday, People’s Party MP Rangsiman Rome said that before the 2023 election, the MFP had submitted its policy to amend Article 112 to the Election Commission, which did not raise the possibility that it might be ethically questionable.
“I don’t understand how sponsoring to amend a law is illegal, as it is the duty of an MP,” he wrote. “Besides, there are no laws prohibiting the amendment to Article 112.” He also called into question the NACC’s impartiality, arguing that complaints filed by opposition MPs against those in power saw little progress, while cases against opposition MPs moved forward with “remarkable efficiency.”
This double standard is no accident. As I noted upon the People’s Party’s founding last August, “The dissolution of the MFP extended a pattern of elite intervention in the political sphere, aimed at protecting the royalist-conservative establishment from any serious political challenge.”
All of this lends a certain inevitability to the charges against the 44 former MFP parliamentarians. It seems like merely a matter of time before they, too, are proscribed by the judiciary and ejected from the Thai political scene.
