Background to "Adventures in Thai Justice: Four Case Studies"

These studies detail the experience of a number of foreigners in attempting, and failing, to preserve a family investment in Thailand and to protect minor children from injury. Attempts to seek redress for grave violations of the legal process by those acting under government supervision were ignored by lower-ranking officials intent to conceal abuses of power from their superiors.

Summarized from original Thai-language court transcripts and official correspondence, the studies were edited to conceal identities of the minor children and of other innocent victims and are here made available with explanatory comment due to current public interest in the experiences of foreign residents and investors in the Thai justice system.

The studies detail what happens in the bowels of the permanent bureaucracy, in the courts and in state-controlled enterprises. The grave abuses of the legal process detailed in these studies remain unremedied after years of ample notice to the responsible official agencies. To this day every person involved in the misconduct remains at liberty to continue victimizing the public.

When the foreign victims realized they were dealing with parties above the law in Thailand, they approached their own government for advice. After lengthy high-level review of the extremely serious allegations in hundreds of pages of documentation, the victims' government transmitted a polite diplomatic note to the Thai Foreign Ministry requesting investigation and the Thai government's plan for restitution. The Foreign Ministry has never replied to this diplomatic note.

These materials have broad implications for Thailand's future on the world diplomatic stage and in world financial and trading markets in view of such recent press headlines as "Thailand's legal system rated a disgrace--at the bottom of the heap" and "CalPERS snubs the Kingdom". These studies meticulously clarify why the California Public Employees Retirement System is reluctant to return to Thailand and why abuses of the Kingdom's justice system persist year after year.

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