BANGKOK (Reuters) – An activist lawyer lodged a petition on Thursday seeking to dissolve Thailand’s Move Forward Party over its plan to amend a law protecting the monarchy from criticism, in a setback for a party that won an election on a bold agenda of liberal reform.
The petition was filed with the election commission a day after the Constitutional Court ruled the opposition Move Forward had undermined the powerful crown and national security, ordering it to cease its pursuit of changing a law that forbids insulting the monarchy.
Violations of the law are punishable by jail of up to 15 years for each perceived insult of the royal family, making it one of the world’s strictest lese majeste laws. The constitution states the king is enshrined to be held in a position of “revered worship”.
The petition was filed by Ruangkrai Leekitwattana, a lawyer and former senator with a track record of successfully pursuing legal campaigns to ban top bureaucrats and politicians, one of which led to the downfall of a prime minister in 2008.
The election commission will weigh the merits of the complaint and whether to send it to the Constitutional Court to decide on party dissolution, which could see its executives banned from politics for a decade.
Its predecessor, Future Forward, had championed similar policies and was disbanded in 2020 for violating campaign funding rules.
“The election commission must take into account (yesterday’s) case … the commission must carry out its duties and cannot remain idle,” Ruangkrai told reporters.
Move Forward is the biggest party in parliament after its surprise win in last year’s election on a progressive platform that included undoing business monopolies and curbing the military’s entrenched political influence.
The party’s liberal agenda and huge appeal among young and urban voters represents a threat to the status quo in Thailand, colliding with the interests of powerful conservatives and the royalist military, who blocked its attempts to form a government last year.
Move Forward has rejected accusations that it sought to undermine the monarchy and says it wanted to prevent the wrongful use of the royal insults law.
The palace typically does not comment on the lese majeste law. International human rights groups have condemned its use as extreme, including a man facing a record 50 years of prison time over Facebook posts critical of the monarchy.
(Reporting by Panarat Thepgumpanat, Chayut Setboonsarng, and Panu Wongcha-um; Editing by Martin Petty)
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