Concrete reform proposals
None of the reforms below are radical. Every one of them already operates in at least one country Thailand ranks behind on the WJP index. The point is not to reinvent the system — only to bring it in line with the global norm.
Plea bargaining
1 proposalReal plea bargaining, not coerced confession discounts
Replace the §78 mitigation practice with written, judge-supervised plea agreements. The reduction must be on the record, contemporaneous, and reviewable — not a back-room incentive that punishes defendants for exercising the right to trial.
Pretrial
2 proposalsStatutory presumption of bail for non-violent offences
Bail must be the default for any offence not involving violence or genuine flight risk. Courts must record the specific evidence supporting denial, with mandatory review every 30 days.
Hard cap on pretrial detention
Six months should be the absolute ceiling absent extraordinary written justification. Detention exceeding a year while waiting for trial is incompatible with the presumption of innocence.
Speech offences
2 proposalsRepeal the speech provisions of the Computer-Related Crime Act
Section 14(1)–(2) duplicates and amplifies criminal defamation. Defamation should be civil-only; criminal speech offences should be limited to genuine incitement to imminent violence.
End §112 sentence stacking
Lèse-majesté sentences are currently imposed per offending message. The Mongkhon T. case (50 years, January 2024) and the Anchan Preelerd case (87 years halved to 43.5) show what stacking produces. A single course of conduct should be charged as a single offence.
Defence
1 proposalIndependent public defender service
A national public defender, funded outside the Ministry of Justice and with parity of resources to the prosecution, would address the structural imbalance that drives uncontested guilty pleas — particularly for migrant defendants.
Transparency
1 proposalOpen sentencing data
Publish an anonymised, machine-readable case-level dataset every quarter: offence, plea, sentence imposed, time on remand, judicial district. Without data, structural patterns cannot be measured or contested.
What this site is — and is not
This is: a clinical, data-driven account of structural problems with the criminal-justice system, built from public statutes, public statistics, and public international indices.
This is not: a commentary on any individual case, prosecution, or person. No one's name appears anywhere on this site by design. All numbers are aggregate.