Thailand's Constitutional Court ruled on Tuesday that Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej had violated the constitution by hosting a TV show while serving as premier, and ordered him and his cabinet to resign.
"The defendant has violated Article 267 of the constitution, and his position as prime minister has ended," the head of the panel of nine judges, Chat Chonlaworn, said, according to the Associated Press. “The cabinet will remain in a caretaker position until a new administration is installed.”
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| Anti-government demonstrators at Government House in Bangkok, Thailand, shout with joy as they learn that Thai Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej is being forced to resigned from office by the constitutional court. (Photo: AP) |
Karn Tienkaew, deputy leader of Samak's People's Power Party, described the court ruling as a "small legal matter" and said the party planned to meet later and to propose a parliamentary vote to reinstall Samak.
It is unclear whether Tuesday’s ruling by the Constitutional Court will affect Samak’s plan to address the United Nations General Assembly later this month.
According to the Bangkok English language daily the Bangkok Post, Samak intends to urge Burma’s military regime to allow the UN to play a role in the general election planned for 2010.
Speaking at the Foreign Ministry in Bangkok, Samak said the UN’s experience in organizing elections in Cambodia and East Timor could help Thailand’s neighbor establish democracy, the newspaper said.
The prime minister did not explain what kind of role the UN could play in the 2010 election. He stressed that he would not mention the position of opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi in any talks he had with the Burmese junta, the Bangkok Post said.
"The UN cannot help bring any genuine political change in Burma, even if they are offered a role in the 2010 election because the military government will conduct the election based on the referendum that they have ratified without the real will of the Burmese people in Burma,” said Pu Chin Sian Thang, chairman of Burma’s Zomi National Congress.
“What he [Samak] said indeed insults Burmese citizens who are working toward democracy in Burma,” Pu Chin Sian Thang said. “He should deeply consider before he says something like that as he is a democratically elected leader.”
Pu Chin Sian Thang said UN Envoy Ibrahim Gambari, instead of discussing the 2010 election with the Burmese military government, should urge the regime to initiate a tripartite dialogue with the genuine aim of working towards national reconciliation.
Such a dialogue between the Burmese junta, opposition parties and ethnic political parties was of paramount importance if national reconciliation was to be achieved, he said.
During a meeting with Gambari in Bangkok in late August, Samak reportedly said the international community should focus on the 2010 elections instead of dialogue with Suu Kyi.
The French news agency AFP reported that Samak said focusing on Suu Kyi’s release was not the most effective way to bring democracy to Burma.
“Europe uses Aung San Suu Kyi as a tool. If it’s not related to Aung San Suu Kyi, you can have deeper discussions with Burma,” the AFP quoted Samak as saying.
“The [international community] should talk about how to bring democracy to Burma and focus on the constitution and the elections,” he said.
Samak reportedly said he would make the same points when he meets UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in New York in late September.
The Thai premier’s remarks drew strong criticism from Burmese democracy activists and opposition politicians. Suu Kyi’s National National League for Democracy said his comments weren’t appropriate for a national leader.
ထိုင္း၀န္ႀကီးခ်ဳပ္အား ရာထူးမွႏုတ္ထြက္ရမည္ဟု ထိုင္းတရား႐ုံးဆုံးျဖတ္
ထိုင္း၀န္ႀကီးခ်ဳပ္စမတ္သည္ ဖြဲ႔စည္းအုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ပံုအေျခခံဥပေဒကို ခ်ဳိးေဖာက္၍ အစားအစာ ခ်က္ျပဳတ္ေရး ႐ုပ္သံအစီအစဥ္တခုကို ထုတ္လႊင့္ခဲ့ေသာေၾကာင့္ အျပစ္ရိွသျဖင့္ ၀န္ႀကီးခ်ဳပ္အျဖစ္မွ ႏုတ္ထြက္ေပးရမည္ဟု ဖြဲ႔စည္းအုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ပံုဆိုင္ရာတရား႐ံုးက ယေန႔ အမိန္႔ခ်မွတ္လိုက္သည္။
ထိုင္းႏိုင္ငံ ၂၀၀၇ ခု ဖြဲ႔စည္းပံုဥပေဒ၌ ေရြးခ်ယ္ခံ မည္သည့္ႏိုင္ငံေရးသမားမဆို တာ၀န္ထမ္းေဆာင္ေနစဥ္ အျခားလခစားအလုပ္မ်ား လုပ္ကိုင္ခြင့္မရွိေၾကာင္း တားျမစ္ထားျခင္းျဖစ္သည္။ ယခုစြပ္စြဲခ်က္ကို လႊတ္ေတာ္ အမတ္အခ်ဳိ႕က ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲေကာ္မရွင္ထံသို႔ တင္သြင္းခဲ့ျခင္းျဖစ္သည္။
အဆိုပါစြပ္စြဲခ်က္ကို ယမန္ေန႔က စတင္စစ္ေဆးစဥ္ အသက္ (၇၃) ႏွစ္ရွိ ၀န္ႀကီးခ်ဳပ္စမတ္က Face Media Co.,Ltd. မွ ခ်က္ျပဳတ္ေရးအစီစဥ္ ထုတ္လႊင့္ရာ၌ သြားေရးလာေရး ခရီးစရိတ္မွ်သာရၿပီး လခအေနျဖင့္ မရရွိသျဖင့္ အျပစ္မရွိေၾကာင္း ထြက္ဆိုခဲ့သည္။
၎က “က်ေနာ္ ၀ါသနာပါလို႔ အဲဒီလိုလုပ္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ၀န္ႀကီးခ်ဳပ္ျဖစ္ၿပီးေနာက္ ဥပေဒအႀကံေပးေတြနဲ႔ တိုင္ပင္ေတာ့လည္း ကုမၸဏီတခုအတြက္ ပံုမွန္လစာယူ လုပ္ေပးတာမဟုတ္ဘူးဆိုရင္ ဖြဲ႔စည္းပံုဥပေဒနဲ႔ မၿငိစြန္းဘူးလို႔ သူတို႔အားလံုးက ေျပာၾကပါတယ္” ဟု ထြက္ဆိုသည္။
အဆိုပါကုမၸဏီ စီမံခန္႔ခြဲေရးမႉး ဆက္ခ်ဳိင္း ကေယာက္၀နီဆကြန္ကမူ ၎တို႔ကုမၸဏီက မစၥတာစမတ္အား ႐ုပ္သံ ေၾကာ္ျငာ (၄) ခု အတြက္ ဘတ္ေငြ (၈၀,၀၀၀) ေပးခဲ့သည္ဟု တရား႐ံုးတြင္ ထြက္ဆိုခဲ့သည္။ သို႔ေသာ္ ယင္းသို႔ေပးျခင္းသည္ ၀န္ထမ္းအျဖစ္ေပးျခင္းမဟုတ္ဘဲ ဂုဏ္ျပဳမႈတခုအေနျဖင့္သာ ေပးျခင္းျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း ထြက္ဆိုသည္။
မစၥတာစမတ္၏ ျပည္သူ႔စြမ္းအားပါတီ (PPP) အဖြဲ႔၀င္မ်ားကလည္း တရား႐ံုး၏ဆံုးျဖတ္ခ်က္ကို လိုက္နာမည္ ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း ေျပာခဲ့ၿပီးျဖစ္ေသာ္လည္း ၎တို႔အေနျဖင့္ မစၥတာစမတ္အား ဆက္လက္ေထာက္ခံသြားမည္ ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္းလည္း ေဖာ္ျပခဲ့ၾကသည္။
မစၥတာစမတ္ႏုတ္ထြက္ေပးလိုက္ရသျဖင့္ လစ္လပ္သြားသည့္ ၎ေနရာအား အစားထိုးရန္ ၫြန္႔ေပါင္းအစိုးရ အဖြဲ႔၀င္ ပါတီ (၆) ခုအတြင္း ေဆြးေႏြးၾကမည္ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း၊ မစၥတာစမတ္သည္ လႊတ္ေတာ္အမတ္ ျဖစ္ေနေသး ေသာေၾကာင့္ အစိုးရအဖြဲ႔၀င္ အျခား (၅) ပါတီက လက္ခံပါက ၀န္ႀကီးခ်ဳပ္ျပန္လည္ အေရြးခံႏိုင္ေသးေၾကာင္း PPP အဖြဲ႔၀င္ မစၥတာ ၀ိထယာက ေျပာသည္။
ယခုအခါ ထိုင္းႏိုင္ငံေရးအေနအထားသည္ ႐ႈပ္ေထြးလ်က္ရွိၿပီး မစၥတာစမတ္၏ ႐ံုးသည္လည္း ၎အား ႏုတ္ထြက္ေပးရန္ ေတာင္းဆိုေနေသာ ဆႏၵျပသူမ်ား၏ သိမ္းပိုက္ျခင္းကို ယခင္လ (၂၆) ရက္မွစ၍ ယခုအထိ ခံထားရဆဲျဖစ္သည္။ ယခုလဆန္းပိုင္းတြင္ ႏိုင္ငံေတာ္အေရးေပၚအေျခအေန ေၾကညာထားေသာ္လည္း ျပည္သူ႔ဒီမိုကေရစီမဟာမိတ္အဖြဲ႔ (PAD) ဦးေဆာင္ေသာ ဆႏၵျပ သူမ်ားက ဆက္လက္စုေ၀းေနဆဲျဖစ္သည္။
ယခင္သီတင္းပတ္ကလည္း ၀န္ႀကီးခ်ဳပ္႐ံုးသို႔ ခ်ီတက္ဆႏၵျပသည့္ ဘန္ေကာက္ၿမိဳ႕ ရမ္ခဲန္ဟမ္တကၠသိုလ္မွ ေက်ာင္းသားမ်ားကို အမည္မသိ ေသနတ္သမားမ်ားက ပစ္ခတ္သျဖင့္ ေက်ာင္းသား (၂) ဦး ဒဏ္ရာရ သြားၿပီးေနာက္ ဆႏၵျပမႈမ်ားအတြင္း ေက်ာင္းသားမ်ားလည္း ပိုမိုပါ၀င္လာၾကၿပီ ျဖစ္သည္။
