A seminal court case clashed with new government policy, and it is going to take some time to sort out the outcome. In the Court of Appeal, a so-called "forest dweller" was found guilty of trespassing and imprisoned for a year with a hefty fine of 140,000 baht. At Government House at almost the same time, a new programme to reform forest laws was announced. Its aim is to commercialise forested areas.
The guilty person is well known to those who follow the issue closely. Nittaya Muangklang and her family have become activists in the battle to enable forest dwellers to remain on land they have occupied for generations. Ms Nittaya told the Court of Appeal in her native Chaiyaphum province that that Muangklangs had lived on the land since before the 1941 Forest Act under which she was convicted. That and subsequent laws of its kind aim to boot out citizens without rock-solid land ownership papers.
Of course, few of the tens of thousands of people living on declared forest lands have such papers. Indigenous people have been tossed off their land as "encroachers" or "trespassers" for a long time now. The current military regime has stepped up the process. But it has also shown sympathy in certain cases. Some forest dwellers are apparently "good" while others, particularly those whose land is inside a national park, have been designated as "bad".
