Supreme Commander: Dictatorship in Constitutional History of Thailand from 2483 – 2487 B.E.

Abstract

Despite the successful transition of the regime on 24 June 1932 to become a democratic state established by the People Party (Kana Ratsadon), who later drafted the constitution declaring that the state’s supremacy shall be given to the people and founded constitutional organizations that were connected with the people as to exercise power in accordance with the principle of separation of powers, the new regime faced great challenges throughout the course of its life. Such challenges were not only limited to the responses by the reactionary movement but also the most important was the shift of power inside the People Party itself posed by World War 2. By facing the outside threat, the role of the military faction inside the People Party as the guardian of the new regime had been strengthened, leading to the establishment of the Supreme Commander as one of the state’s governing bodies and thus resulted in a change in the legal system. The newly established body was given the supreme status in the form of Commissarial Dictatorship to legitimately exercise absolute military power to operate missions during World War 2. However, the change in Thai’s legal system in regard to the establishment of the Commissarial Dictatorship saw a dynamic development ever since the war, leading to an exclusion of the political and legal system established according to the 1932 Constitution. Such role was not only granted an administrative power, but also the legislation and the command of the judiciary. It was then transformed into the Sovereign Dictatorship, who was able to use power to establish the regime ruled by the military dictatorship and thus replacing the democratic system which was constituted by the People Party from 1940 to 1944.