Earlier this year, when President Arroyo insisted on appointing the new Supreme Court Chief Justice, critics accused her of seeking to stack the judiciary to ensure it would uphold her policies and shield her from accountability. So far, it hasn’t exactly worked out that way. The Supreme Court seems intent on accommodating the new Aquino administration and hasn’t stuck its neck out for Arroyo. According to reports from Manila, it seems like the Supreme Court will not rule Aquino’s Executive Order No. 2 unconstitutional. E.O. No. 2 would sack all of Arroyo’s midnight appointees. We’ll see what happens, but for now the much-anticipated showdown between Aquino and the justices looks a ways off.
So much for hegemonic preservation
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Filed under Aquino, Philippines, Supreme Court
Constitutional Court and vote counting in Thailand
The sequel to my earlier article about Thailand’s judicial system is now up on the New Mandala blog. This one focuses exclusively on the Thai Constitutional Court. Much of this story is already familiar to anybody who watches Thailand. However, I tried to retell that story by focusing on vote counting within the court. Often, the foreign press, and even some academics, portray the bench as a monolith. Particularly after King Bhumibol’s speech to a group of judges in late April 2006, many observers have portrayed the Constitutional and Supreme Courts as agents of the monarchy. However, I note that, by and large, the vote was close and most judges voted the same way they had in the 2001 prosecution against Thaksin. There’s a lot I don’t know about the politics behind the bench, and a lot of research to be done, but I at least hope these articles force some readers to rethink the relationship between politics and courts in Thailand.
In other news, the Supreme Court turned down an appeal by Thaksin to review the February decision confiscating his assets.
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Filed under constitutional tribunal, Thailand
Super Ombudsman
The Philippine Supreme Court recently decided that the Ombudsman can remove corrupt officials (within the executive bureaucracy) directly, on its own initiative. That’s frankly a startling new power to just “discover” so many years after the Ombudsman Office began operations. It also potentially makes the Ombudsman a much more powerful player. Interestingly, this decision was penned by Justice Antonio Carpio, notably one not sympathetic to Arroyo (he swore Aquino in). Thus, the Ombudsman could become a powerful too in the Aquino campaign to clean up the bureaucracy of corrupt Arroyo appointees – assuming he’s serious about following through on his pledges. You can read more about the case here.
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Filed under Philippines
Prosecuting from a compromised position
A quick update on the Anwar “homosexuality” trial in Malaysia. One of the government prosecutors allegedly had a sexual affair with a key Anwar witness. This is the same key former aide who accused Anwar of sodomizing him. That compromises the prosecution’s case a bit, to say the least. Here are articles from the Economist and Tribune.
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Filed under Anwar Ibrahim, Malaysia
Cooking up a constitutional storm
In working on an article about Thailand’s Constitutional Court, I came across an interesting LLM dissertation by a Thai lawyer about the 2008 case removing Samak Sundaravej from the prime ministership because he had concurrently hosted a TV cooking show.* In Three-Course Recipe for the Court’s Cookery: A Critique on Thai Democracy and Judicial Review, Verapat Pariyawong criticizes the court not for the result, but for the lack of legal reasoning.
He instead proposes that the court adopt a different analysis for constitutional interpretation: 1) utilize separation of powers as the policy framework; 2) exercise judicial restraint where a political branch of government could better provide a remedy; and 3) balance the decision against any potential adverse effects on fundamental rights.
Verapat also criticizes the court for not clarifying key constitutional phrases (such as “to prevent the exercise of power for personal gain” in § 267). Again, his proposed solution is a three-part test, this time adopted from the 1999 Anti-Corruption Act: 1) the official shares an interest in the private business as an employee; 2) such business is examined or supervised by a government agency; and 3) the interests of the agency might conflict with the public interest.
There’s very little English-language literature on Thailand, and I’m glad I found this thesis. Sometimes, the thesis veers more toward comparisons between Thai and American constitutional interpretation, which is of limited use considering how different the two countries are (a comparison with Indonesia might have been more appropriate). Nonetheless, overall, this is a useful source for its discussion on Thai jurisprudence.
* The dissertation does include a copy of the Cookery decision, but unfortunately it is only in Thai.
Dominic J. Nardi, Jr. 
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