กฎหมายในความรุนแรง ความรุนแรงในกฎหมาย: การลอยนวลพ้นผิดทางกฎหมายของรัฐไทยในกรณีการใช้กำลังเข้าปราบปรามผู้ชุมนุมทางการเมือง

Abstract

The research aims to study the role of the Thai legal system and its institutions in managing major violent incidents in Thai political history, the 14th October 1974 uprising, the 6th October 1976 massacre, the May 1992 popular protest, and the 2010 April-May Thai military crackdown, based on question about how the state has been employing the judicial system to protect officials and others implicated in violence against civilians with impunity. The study is conducted in the concept of legal violence, drawing on theories of violence and legal impunity as well as knowledge of the state impunity and critical legal studies. The findings revealed that when the legal system is obliged to deal with state-sanctioned violence, it will always become a sort of violence by concealing, distorting, disguising, and justifying the violence in the setting that the preparators and commanders were exempted from punishment, despite clear evidence of the nature of the crime. Furthermore, the preceding case also reiterates that impunity is one of the political bodies whose role is to connect the other important powers and assuring their existence under the umbrella of state, to support and to sustain the structure of power relation in which authoritarians can violate civilians at any time and to provide fertile ground for impunity to culturally rooted which led to the legitimization of state-sanctioned violence at the end.