Friday, April 24, 2009

Constitutional court ruling 7/2541 (1998)

Since Google introduced the new feature Search Wiki, I could finally filter out all the spam results from my standard searches, e.g. for the word "tambon". And once all the hotel sites and the Wikipedia clones are no longer visible, the interesting links are much easier to see. That's how I could now find the following, which normally would be hidden between spam somewhere around the 10th or 15th page of search results.

In ruling No. 7/2541 the constitutional court (ศาลรัฐธรรมนูญ) decided on a complaint issued by the municipal council of Tha Kham, Surat Thani, which was dissolved by the Ministry of the Interior and replaced by a provisional council by the provincial governor. The root for this dissolution order is the fact that with the constitution of 1997 the terms of the municipal council was changed from 5 years (as of the Municipal Act, B.E. 2496) to 4 years. However the council was elected for a term of 5 years, and the 1997 constitution did not include a transitory provision for this case. As the council was not willing to stand for a new election one year early, the Ministry ordered the dissolution, and even did not follow the normal suit that the outgoing council stays in office till the new one was elected but appointed a provisional council instead. However, the court did not accept the case, and the council members also failed in a second ruling (10/2541) few weeks later.

Of course the whole was only accessible to me thanks to the fact that the main part of the ruling was translated into English - the Thai version like the full document published in the Royal Gazette (Volume 115, Issue 69 ก, Page 1-23) is of course beyond my grasp.

No comments: