When I think of the Thai judiciary, I immediately think of a phone conversation that must have been somewhere around 1998. I was in the office of the Bangkok Post, and the switchboard put through a call to the foreign news subs desk, for want of knowing what else to do with it, from a rep from the US journalists’ union, seeking advice on how to start a court case against a Thai tycoon who’d started up a newspaper, got lots of top international journalists to write for it for a couple of months, then it folded without paying anyone.
My advice was simple, “don’t”. Chances of success, zero. I still remember the bemusement of the caller.
But I realised when I listened to the New Books Network podcast with Duncan McCargo, author of Fighting for Virtue, that I really never learnt that much about the judiciary. It has all the rigidity you’d expect from something intimately associated with the royal family in Thailand, and even for Thailand, quite amazingly tight hierarchy – a fiendishly difficult exam to be taken at age 25 (based entirely on rote learning) sets the individual status of each judge who passes in the hierarchy, to continue almost certainly for their entire career.
Truly a telling, rich account of a society I’ve longed feared is so rigid as to be profoundly, terribly dangerously, unstable.
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