Army Reserve students to educate public on charter, drafting process

THE NATIONAL Council for Peace and Order will use Army Reserve students as a channel that it hopes will help the public get a greater understanding of the draft constitution before it is voted on in a national referendum.

Lt-General Werachai Indusobhana, commander of the Territorial Defence Command, said yesterday the Army would stage an activity in which the 300,000 or so military reserve students nationwide would get greater understanding of the constitution and how it is being written.

Werachai outlined three stages of the programme at its launch yesterday.

The first stage involves nationwide seminars this month and next month where the people who will teach the students under their command will themselves be educated about the charter. 

That will be followed by the students being lectured on the constitution and the process of drafting it.

In the third stage, the students will be used as core figures in helping to explain the constitution and the drafting process to their families and communities ahead of next year’s scheduled referendum.

The 2014 provisional charter says the Constitution Drafting Commission must finish the draft by next April and send it to concerned agencies for review and it needs to be approved via a national referendum. 

A drafter of the voted-down first charter, Wuttisak Lapcharoensap, and a current drafter, Amorn Wanichwiwatana, will take part in the campaign.

Wuttisak stressed that training of the students was not to brainwash them but to ensure correct details could be spread ahead of the referendum.

Amorn, a CDC spokesman, said the 21 CDC members alone could not make Thais understand the draft so they needed to rely on the students for help.

He said he would impart the right information on the military.

Commenting on the controversial Article 35 of the interim constitution, Amorn said it did not mean the establishment of a reform and strategic committee, feared by some to be more powerful than the future government if set up, was a certainty.

The CDC will gather public opinion on whether they want the committee included in the draft charter, he said.

However, Deputy Prime Minister Wissanu Krea-ngam admitted that the NCPO- and Article 35-supplied framework the CDC worked under limited the panel’s independence although he said the drafters were given enough leeway to write what they wanted.

Wissanu also said the framework did not mean the CDC had to include the reform and strategic committee in the charter draft.

He insisted that there was nothing worrying about Article 35 because it only stipulated what the public wanted such as eliminating corruption and populist policies.

In a related development, the Ombudsmen have asked the charter drafters yesterday to give their office the capacity to discipline state agencies that fail to act in accordance with suggestions within 90 days, in the same way as when they violate a Cabinet resolution.

The request came after the CDC invited the Ombudsmen on how to enhance the performance of their office in investigating complaints about poor or improper administration by public authorities.

The Ombudsmen – there are three – proposed six major points they would like to see in the draft constitution to help facilitate their duties being fulfilled. Most share the same bottom line – that the Ombudsmen should have the same powers granted to their office by the 2007 Constitution, if not more.

Meanwhile, CDC spokesman Norachit Sinhaseni said that as the CDC had already been working for two weeks it was time that they invite envoys and international organisations to hear about progress on the charter. The invitation had been widely accepted, so diplomats and group representatives would meet with the drafters on Monday, he said. However, he said the press were not included.