Thailand’s Constitutional Court yesterday accepted a petition to disband the nation’s largest opposition party which was previously found guilty of breaching the charter over efforts to amend the royal defamation law.
The court accepted the petition by the Thai Election Commission to dissolve the Move Forward Party, based on the same court’s verdict in January that the group’s campaign to loosen the lese majeste law, also known as Article 112 of the Thai penal code, amounted to an attempt to overthrow the country’s constitutional monarchy.
The Move Forward Party has 15 days to submit its defense, the court said in a statement.
Photo: EPA-EFE
The case is the latest in a series of blows against the upstart party, which shook Thai politics by winning the most parliamentary seats on support from largely young and urban voters who had grown frustrated with nearly a decade of military-backed administrations.
Its candidate, Pita Limjaroenrat, was blocked by pro-establishment conservative lawmakers from becoming the prime minister last year, before being cleared of allegations that he had contravened election rules.
If the opposition party is dissolved, Pita and other executive members would likely be banned from politics for 10 years.
As part of the January ruling, the charter court ordered Move the Forward Party to stop all attempts to revise the royal insult law, which protects the monarchy from defamation and carries up to 15 years in prison for each offense.
The Move Forward Party’s predicament has been likened to that of its predecessor, the Future Forward Party, which was dissolved and whose key leaders were barred from political office for a decade.
A fresh dissolution order could also potentially unleash more political unrest, but the reformist party, which won 151 seats in the 500-member parliament and almost 40 percent of the popular votes in May last year, has remained unfazed, with Pita saying the group had “long prepared” itself for a potential dissolution.
When a political party is dissolved, its sitting lawmakers may join a new party within 30 days to keep their seats in the lower house.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion