It’s time for the midweek rant from ThaiVisa News and this week it is a hard-hitting article on the sentencing system in Thailand. As ever, the views and ideas put forward in the article are not necessarily those of the Buriram Times. However, on a personal note there is little to disagree with.
Pick a mushroom in a forest and get thirty years.
Have a trace element of an illegal substance in a wallet and kiss goodbye to freedom for a few decades.
But rent a taxi to a double convicted rapist and pay 3,000 baht.
This is not a rant about people who are not brought to justice a la Red Bull heir.
This is not a rant about those who slip through the net and never face justice. Though that is horrendous enough in Thailand.
This is about those people who have broken the criminal law or those who have fallen foul of government regulations – and get such ridiculous sentences that it makes a mockery of the very word justice itself.
Lenient sentences that both belittle and are a disgrace to victims, light sentences that make criminals snigger with glee as they serve five minutes in jail and are out again to repeat their crimes.
Severe sentences particular, but not exclusively, against the poor and downtrodden, that advertise Thailand as a country of absurd inconsistency and patent ongoing injustice.
This is not a topical rant. One brought on by an isolated incident.
Any week of the year you can find poor people like the mushroom sellers who are facing the most incredible harshness because they couldn’t afford adequate legal representation.
Every week you can find people who will not see the light of day because someone had it in for them and the system could not protect them.
Every week you can see terrible crime – crime that has been confirmed in a court of law, or admitted in a police station without duress – punished by the proverbial slap on the wrist, sometimes even let go because an apology was made to society or a graap or a wai was forthcoming.
The inconsistency is staggering, shameful and institutionalized. It is nothing short of an affront to the public who deserve so much better.
But nobody seems to be doing anything about it. The clamour for change seems to be muttered in markets, quietly spoken of on buses and in queues for street food.
The people who are so aware of injustice should be shouting for change.
Many laws and statutes seem to have been in existence from a bygone era. They have simply never caught up to modern times.
Fines seem to be stuck in a time-warp .
But it is the sentences that really rankle. Someone seems to have plucked figures from the air – where is the consistency, where is the fairness?
There is virtually none and consequently the faith of the public in what passes for the justice system could hardly be lower.
The jails are full to the rafters with those convicted of drugs offences – just like in America.
Few would say that drugs are not a scourge in either society but is there not a woeful imbalance? And do the harsh sentences handed down to minor dealers address the problem.
Of course they don’t – they just make the authorities look as though they have done something useful while the big fish go free and are almost never apprehended.
So what needs to be done?
Well first off, there needs to be a National Commission set up to review sentences and make recommendations to address the haphazard imbalances in both civil and criminal systems.
Then those recommendations need to be taken on board – if and when the country is returned to democracy, that is.
Equally, the fines that are handed out need urgent review. Companies that flagrantly rip off and con the public need to be slapped with something that hurts.
Not something they can find in the till that might have been a reasonable sum in 1905.
The rich who break the law need to pay. And pay through the nose.
The commission’s watchwords need to be modernization and justice. The people – as quiet as they seem to be at times – are fed up with inconsistency and patent unfairness.
The time to act is actually long past.
But if something is not done soon those who point the finger at Thailand’s justice system and laugh at the absurd inconsistencies will just gain more traction.
And the face that Thais are so desperate to protect will just get increasingly hard for anyone to take seriously.