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Dictatorship on Trial
Coups and the Future of Justice in Thailand
Tyrell Haberkorn
- 288 pages
- English
- PDF
- Available on iOS & Android
Dictatorship on Trial
Coups and the Future of Justice in Thailand
Tyrell Haberkorn
About This Book
In 2014, after a decade of political turmoil, the National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO) carried out Thailand's 13th coup since the country's transformation from absolute to constitutional monarchy in 1932. Though the NCPO promised to restore the rule of law, justiceālong tenuous in Thailandādisappeared entirely. The legal system was used to criminalize the thoughts and actions of democratic dissidents, facilitate extrajudicial violence, and guarantee impunity for the coup and crimes by state officials. Combining legal and historical scholarship and long-term courtroom observation, Dictatorship on Trial traces the legal, social, and political impacts of authoritarianism, and foregrounds court decisions as both a history of repression and a site in which to imagine future justice.
Organized chronologically across the five years of the NCPO regime, each chapter takes up a different political case and enumerates the ways in which political activists were made vulnerable rather than protected by the state's interpretations of the law, and the mechanisms through which perpetrators evaded accountability. Inspired by feminist legal scholars, the substantive analysis in each chapter is followed by new, rewritten judgments created in collaboration with Thai human rights activists. In plotting these alternative logics, interpretations of evidence, and conclusions, Tyrell Haberkorn outlines what true justice might look like, and assesses the legal and political transformations necessary to realize it.
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Table of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Contents
- Note on Language, Translation, Dates, and Court Documents
- Abbreviations
- Prologue: Law for the People
- Introduction: History and Jurisprudence
- One: The Impossibility of the People
- Two: Coups and Coupocracy
- Three: Refusal to Report
- Four: A Constitution without the People
- Five: Disavowing Responsibility
- Epilogue: Judgments That Cannot Be Rewritten
- Appendix: Sources for Court Documents in Thailand
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Back Cover