The courts are rotten

While PPT has been concentrating recent posts on the biased, royalist and corrupt Constitutional Court, it has to be said that the courts in the country are generally rotten. A recent report in the Bangkok Post reminds us of another biased decision:

The Appeal Court has upheld the Criminal Court’s rejection of an appeal lodged by relatives seeking justice for 78 protesters killed after the protest in Narathiwat’s Tak Bai district in 2004.

The Appeal Court handed down the ruling yesterday in response to a further appeal from 34 relatives of the protesters who died as they were being transported from Tak Bai police station to the Ingkhayutthaborihan military camp in Pattani province in October 2004.

The relatives had appealed the Criminal Court’s decision not to accept their petition against an initial ruling made by a lower court in Songkhla province….

… the Songkhla Court said the protesters had suffocated as a result of an accident and that government officials who were in charge of them had performed their duties properly.

The courts are a part of a system that grants impunity to officials – in this case, mainly the Army – and permits them to murder and intimidate citizens. Almost all of this intimidation and murder is conducted to protect the festering sore that is the status quo.