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Thailand Criminal Justice
Until the nineteenth century the source of criminal law in
the kingdom was ancient Thai law based on the Indian
Dharmashastra (a Hindu legal code attributed to Manu),
which was introduced into the country during the Ayutthaya era
(see The Ayutthaya Era, 1350-1767
, ch. 1). Over the centuries
this code was augmented by numerous and sometimes conflicting
royal laws and decrees, and there was little uniformity in the
interpretations and applications made by different judges. The
resulting tangle of legal concepts and arbitrary judicial
decisions was strongly criticized by Western countries whose
nationals were brought in as advisers or engaged in commerce in
the kingdom during the nineteenth century. Objecting to the
complexities, cruel punishments, delays, and injustices of the
legal system, each Western government insisted that its nationals
and others under its protection in the kingdom be subject only to
the jurisdiction of its own extraterritorial courts. By the
middle of the nineteenth century, the system of
extraterritoriality was firmly established and had further
complicated an already confusing legal structure.
Concerned by the limitations on the country's sovereignty and
encouraged by treaty promises that extraterritoriality would be
ended when the laws and judiciary were modernized, the Thai
rulers set about making legal reforms. Whereas earlier kings had
attempted to codify existing law and eliminate many of the
harsher punishments, King Mongkut upon his accession to the
throne in 1851 went further. Proclaiming the equality of all
people before the law, he tried to improve standards of judicial
honesty and competence and to abolish the delays and conflicting
rules that had become so much a part of the judicial administration .
During the reign of King Chulalongkorn, who succeeded Mongkut
in 1868, legal reform took a new direction. Whereas previous
kings had tried to revise and adapt ancient law to meet modern
needs, Chulalongkorn believed that the problem would be solved
not by revising the old system but by replacing it. He created
the Ministry of Justice in 1892, extending its powers to all
courts of the kingdom. The ministry's first task was to develop a
modern uniform court structure, a process that continued until
1920, ten years after Chulalongkorn's death.
During this period existing statutory and customary laws were
collected and codified, and an enormous volume of new legislation
was added. In 1897 a commission composed almost entirely of
French and Belgian lawyers was appointed to draw up a penal code,
which was promulgated in 1908. The constitutional monarchy
established after the coup of 1932 brought about further legal
reforms, promulgated in 1935 in the Criminal and Civil Procedures
Code. This new legislation was based on Thai and Western legal
practices that provided substantial safeguards in the administration of justice. In response to these legal reforms and the
incorporation into Thai law of some Western concepts of jurisprudence , the system of extraterritoriality was completely
eliminated by 1938. Further legal refinements resulted in the
Criminal Code of 1956, which in the late 1980s remained the core
of Thai criminal law.
Data as of September 1987
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