It is simply wrong to say that Article 237 of the constitution, that calls for parties to be dissolved if their executive board approves electoral fraud, does not happen in the real world. It does, and it is one of the hottest topics for the CIO for the past couple of years. It is called compliance. For corporations, it is Sarbanes-Oxley, SOx, or often J-SOx the Japanese equivalent. For hospitals it is HEPA. For merchants we have PCI. For politicians in Thailand, we have article 237.
There are a few points that need to be cleared up first. Article 237 does not call for the automatic disillusion of a party for electoral fraud. It calls for the party to be dissolved (and the executive board banned for five years) if the executive board knows of, and does not prevent, electoral fraud.
There's a difference there, the difference between a company employee doing something illegal, and the company ordering its employees to do something illegal. One should (by common sense) by a personal crime, the other should get the company dissolved.
The grey area is when a member of the executive board commits fraud himself. In the case of Yongyuth "The Refrigerator", the PPP's argument was not that The Refrigerator had not committed fraud, but on the interpretarion of 237.
The Refrigerator was himself a party executive. It followed that it was impossible for a party executive (Refrigerator) to not know the fraud that an MP (Refrigerator) was doing as he was one and the same person. The PPP's argument was simply that article 237 should be interpreted as "other" party executives excluding the one who committed fraud. The courts did not agree and dissolved the PPP.
The Redshirts have spun this as the courts interfering in politics. That the courts keep dissolving Thaksin's parties for small reasons to keep him out of power. They neglect to mention the rationale for 237 in the first place, that is not so much to keep Refrigerator and Tux out of power per se, but rather to prevent an executive board from ordering mass electoral fraud.
But fast forward to Enron and beyond. It is that different from the compliance requirements companies have had to endure after the Enron incident? Redshirts often argue that in a democracy, people do not get sent to jail for something they did not do. Well, for compliance issues, a person can be sent to jail for failing to do something, be it having the accounts audited properly, failing to implement security or failing to keep logs.
In real business, people have to prove their innocence nowadays by proving compliance with SOx, et. al. Why should politicians be any different? Political parties should be held to higher standards than university clubs the same way big corporations that effect lots of people need to be held to higher standards than the shop around the corner.
The Yongyuth Refrigerator incident was not the best showcase for 237, but the idea behind it is sound. Taking it away would be akin to taking away SOx and turning back the time to pre-Enron. Would we want another Enron? Would we want another Thaksin?
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