FRIDAY, March 29, 2024
nationthailand

Rule of law undermined by too many outdated laws

Rule of law undermined by too many outdated laws

When a country has too many archaic laws, the rule of law suffers. And if outdated or unenforceable legislation remains in the system, the nation’s legal, political and economic ecosystems get clogged up

Former Bank of Thailand governor Prasarn Trairatvorakul told a public seminar recently that in order for the country to keep abreast of the “New Normal” under ever-changing conditions, the state would have to undergo a major overhaul in at least two areas:
The government will have to shift from its “supervisory and control” role to one of support, which means allowing the market mechanism to work uninterrupted.
To achieve this, he said, the public sector will have to review, replace
and rewrite laws and regulations to suit the new situation.
Believe it or not, Thailand currently has a total of at least 100,000 laws and 1,500 licences for various activities. Applying for a permit to do business still involves a maze of government agencies.
Experts, he said, estimate that the presence of excessive, unnecessary and irrelevant laws has pushed up costs of doing business in Thailand by 10-20 per cent of the gross domestic product. If there is one clear reason why the country has been caught in the middle-income trap for so long, this is it.
The second major change the state must undertake to keep up with new global trends is in fact very basic, but somehow it hasn’t taken root in the Thai bureaucratic mentality: Regulators can’t be at the same time operators, and vice versa. Recognition of the dangers posed by conflicts of interest within officialdom is still very low – so much so that most bureaucrats will insist that “command and control” is the only way to keep the system going.
Justice Minister General Paiboon Koomchaya admitted the other day that the country’s legal system was in serious need of an overhaul – with more than 1,000 pieces of legislation seen as inapplicable or unenforceable and countless sets of regulations overlapping one another.
He said this administration alone had passed as many as 465 laws, more than any other government, “but over 100 of them aren’t enforceable in real practice”.
How did that come about? The answer is simple but frustrating for citizens, who have repeatedly been promised that major reform of the country’s outdated justice system is a major objective of the government, installed two years ago after a military coup.
The reason why so many pieces of legislation are redundant, after being passed with very specific purposes of solving the country’s urgent and serious problems, beggars belief: Nobody has made sure that follow-up organic laws or ministerial announcements were issued in accordance with the stipulations in the original legislation.
The minister explained that some cabinet members don’t know how to proceed once a law has been published in the Royal Gazette, at which time organic laws to pin down details of its implementation have to be issued within a certain timeframe.
That’s only part of the problem. One can attribute that oversight to a lack of experience, ignorance or inattention. But the other – and perhaps more damning reason for the legal logjam – came in the minister’s revelation that although he had wanted to tackle the issue of “stacks of outdated legislation” over the past two years, relevant agencies have refused to accede to reform because of entangled, vested interests.
In other words, the legal reform process has been stalled by inexperienced ministers and negligent bureaucrats who are trying to keep outdated laws alive to protect their own influence and interests.
Can we now expect a major renewed effort to overhaul the country’s legal system to wipe out overlapping, outdated and murky laws whose only reason for existing is to prolong corruption, inefficiency and vested interests?
This government can’t claim to be powerless over this deplorable state of affairs. Without real political will and an enforceable policy to eradicate all traces of archaic legislation, things will remain fluid and the legitimacy of this coup-backed government will come into serious question yet again.

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