Sondhi Limthongkul and justice in Thailand

The truth is, all of the above shouldn’t matter. For all the talk about “injustice” in Thailand, the focus has always been on “political injustice”. “Legal injustice”, which is a lot more important, has been largely ignored, and this is where our problems lie. We often compensate legal wrongdoing with political deeds, saying this or that person shouldn’t be penalised for an illegal act because of all the “good” they have done for communities, provinces or the country. We often say “What about the other guys?” in an attempt to point out that someone is being unfairly politically persecuted.

The truth is, if a man is accused of a crime, nothing else matters – including his political status. In the case of Sondhi, the question is whether or not he faked a document to get a big bank loan, period. He should be put on trial as an ordinary suspect and everything should proceed from there.

The trick is how to be consistent. Only consistent delivery of “legal justice” can end our protracted political trouble. Of course, politics is making it harder to pursue legal justice because every high-profile court ruling is being spiced up politically, but we have no choice but to go ahead. Thailand’s problem is not Thaksin or Sondhi being “victimised”; our problem is that we only care about “political victims”.

And caring too much about political victims can lead to long-term misery. The attitude has already grown into a distorted mindset. In Thailand, crimes are not judged by whether the laws are broken or not, but by who committed them and by what they had done earlier – which have absolutely nothing to do with the crimes themselves. What we have been doing politically is tantamount to asking if a robber who killed his victim should get off lightly because he had previously helped build a temple or rushed a woman in labour to hospital.

This is a country where the late Samak Sundaravej lost his job as prime minister because he received a pittance for appearing on a TV show. Prior to that, Sanan Kachornprasart, another late political big gun, was banned from politics for five years after filing a parliamentary report falsely claiming he had a debt of Bt15 million. The good news is that the two cases seem to suggest a strong foundation for “legal justice”. The bad news is both cases have been heavily politicised.

Even in the sometimes-flexible realm of religion, they don’t favour whitewashing or compensation for souls. Only after you have paid for you sins with a stint in hell are you permitted to enter heaven. Politics is not holy enough to justify exemptions.

The Thai political divide has made people forget that there is bad and good on both sides. This is where the judiciary comes into play. Certain things cannot be judged via a popularity contest. In other words, a national vote is not the way to decide whether Sondhi used illegal documents to secure a bank loan and whether he should go to jail.

People say the Senate should be “independent”, or the House of Representatives should be free from military influence, or the people’s voice is what counts the most. These are political perspectives that are meaningful only to a certain extent. What should be truly and ultimately independent, just and of greatest significance is the judiciary.

Without a judiciary that is fair, irrespective of who is standing in the dock, the political crisis will continue. But worse than that, Thailand’s sense of right and wrong will be twisted out of shape from the bottom of the pyramid up to its very top. In the long run, we will not be a country weakened by political crisis, but by a moral, legal and ethical collapse.

We are on the brink of the slippery slope, mind you (if not already half way down it). Sondhi’s case is a challenge, but there are many more in which legal evidence is giving way to the “colour” of the suspects or the “good” they have done. We need to crawl our way back, starting by seeing a crime for what it is, and not for its political significance.