Capabilities
Part of the planning process is identifying who is responsible for the wellbeing of people and gathering information in order to determine if the level of support provided is sufficient in resolving the issues of the people.
Officials that willfully ignore crimes against humanity are complicit in the victimization of the people they have an obligation to protect. If these actions have existed for generations, it is necessary to plan for the solution to take generations to take effect.
Planned Actions
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Implement a judicial review in an effort to improve the rule of law in consideration of crimes that take advantage of the vulnerable in Thailand.
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Next, strengthen existing common law. This activity will facilitate establishing new legal standing that will empower prosecutors. The change in the legal standing will help extinguish the belief system that criminal activities will occur unhindered in spite of existing jurisprudence.
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To implement change in the policing practices of the national military, regional police and local police the national administration will need to raise the standards expected of their forces to better serve the citizens they have an obligation to protect. ​
Under Thailand’s civil law jurisprudence, lawyers are subordinate to judges as a professional group. Judges are considered bureaucratic civil servants that operate under the legal methodology of statutory construction, the process of interpreting what a particular statute means so the court may apply it judiciously, often to the benefit of others in the bureaucracy (Cornell Law, 2020). They seldom operate under the broader common law or constitutional mandates. Litigation to make new policy is far less common in the civil law world (Garcia-Villegas, 2006).
Finally, as Thailand has never ceased to be a Kingdom, the moral force of the monarchy, patron client relationships and other customary relationships makes establishing the authority of law more complex (Munger, 2015).
The military and police are powerful groups in Thailand. Both have gained significant influence due to long standing relationships with the United States initiated during the Cold War. Both have expanded in power through massive infusions of aid (Baker & Phongpaichit, 2005). Police train alongside the military, but they operate under the supervision of the prime minister.
The legal system provides little oversight of the police. Prosecutors defer to the police, who decide criminal investigation methods and adjudicate which cases are referred for prosecution (Munger, 2015). Even though the police operate under the advisement of the national administration, the district police are subject to the influence of local power brokers and have a record of corruption.
District police are also known to favor the politically connected and willfully overlook the illegal but lucrative businesses of prostitution and human trafficking (Phongpaichit, Piriyarangsan, and Treerat, 1998). “Thai police's indifference to trafficking women may be explained in part by the ambivalence in Thai culture about prostitution, condemning women in the trade but accepting men using prostitutes as inevitable” (Munger, 2015).