Thailand’s Amnesty Excludes Critics, Protecting Power Not Promoting Justice
Amnesty is always a transaction. The question isn’t whether to forget, but who gets to decide what’s unforgettable, and who is forced to perform the forgetting. In Thailand, the debate over pardoning political offenders, spearheaded by House Speaker Wan Muhamad Noor Matha, is a stark lesson in how easily the language of reconciliation can become a tool for entrenching existing power imbalances. As reported by the Bangkok Post, the push for these bills is framed as a path towards national harmony. But harmony, in politics, is rarely a spontaneous occurrence. It’s crafted, negotiated, and, often, brutally imposed.
The core of the problem resides in who’s being left out: those accused of lèse-majesté — offenses against the monarchy. This isn’t mere legislative oversight; it’s a brightly flashing signal revealing the monarchy’s continuing gravitational pull on Thai politics. The Pheu Thai Party’s explicit exclusion of Section 112 offenders isn’t just politically expedient; it’s a calculated risk that sacrifices genuine reconciliation on the altar of political survival. It chooses surface calm over deep healing.
However, Mr Wan underscored the bills' potential benefits, saying they could help promote national harmony.
But what kind of harmony is attainable when the very definition of “political offense” is itself a product of political pressure? Thailand’s history is a repeating loop of coups, crackdowns, and carefully curated amnesties. Consider the 2006 coup, where a blanket amnesty swept away any pretense of accountability for those who overturned the elected government. These cyclical amnesties become a form of collective forgetting, a national project of burying inconvenient truths. As Benedict Anderson argued in “Imagined Communities,” nations need shared narratives. But Thailand’s amnesty pattern prevents any coherent story from being constructed. Instead, the past is a mutable text, constantly rewritten to serve the interests of the present regime.
The exclusion of lèse-majesté is particularly corrosive. Section 112 isn’t just another law; it’s a muzzle. It has been wielded against dissidents, journalists, and even ordinary citizens who dared to question the monarchy’s role. Penalties are frequently draconian. To exclude these individuals from amnesty is to telegraph, in the starkest possible terms, the limits of free expression and political engagement. As legal scholar David Streckfuss has extensively documented, the law’s vague language and broad interpretation have created a climate of fear, chilling open debate and stifling dissent. One need only look at the surge in Section 112 cases following the 2014 coup to understand its chilling effect on civil society.
Zooming out, the deeper, systemic issue is this: Thailand remains trapped in a deeply unequal power dynamic. The monarchy, the military, and the entrenched economic elite wield immense influence, shaping the very contours of permissible political discourse. In this context, amnesty becomes a strategic tool for maintaining the status quo, a way to offer limited forgiveness on terms favorable to those in power. It’s not justice; it’s a carefully calibrated release valve, designed to relieve pressure without fundamentally altering the system. You might even call it a form of “authoritarian constitutionalism” — maintaining a veneer of democracy while preserving core power structures.
The long game here is ominous: A society unwilling to grapple honestly with its past is condemned to repeat its errors, only with different actors and slightly altered justifications. If amnesty extends only to specific, pre-approved categories of “political offenders” while others remain vulnerable to draconian laws, the underlying resentments will fester, eventually erupting in new forms of conflict. Authentic national reconciliation requires confronting uncomfortable truths, holding power accountable, and actively working to prevent future injustices. Forgiveness, in other words, is not the absence of justice, but its continuation by other means. And that is precisely what’s conspicuously absent from the Thai amnesty debate.
