Comparative Interpretation of Paragraph 2 of Section 68 of the Thai 2007 Constitution: A Syntactic Approach

Abstract

This research is concerned with a comparative interpretation of Paragraph 2 of Section 68 of the Thai Constitution 2007, English version, which is ambiguous. One hundred four university lecturers of English participated in interpreting one of the sentences of Paragraph 2. Included in the study were 8 views of judges from the Constitutional Court, who voted 7-1 to claim its authority to accept petitions from individuals. The interpretation falls into three groups. The f irst group interpreted that “the person” shall only submit a motion directly to the Constitutional Court. The second interpretation supports the idea that “the person” shall only submit a motion indirectly through the Prosecutor General. The third interpretation supports the idea that “the person” shall submit a motion through two channels, directly to the Constitutional Court or indirectly through the Prosecutor General. A linguistic interpretive approach was employed to attest to these various views. The sentence was parsed and interpreted. The constituents of the sentence were put into tree diagrams to view the interrelationship among the internal parts. The tree diagrams show that while there is a connection between “the person” and the Constitutional Court in Interpretation 1, there is no connection between the Constitutional Court and the Prosecutor General. The tree diagram of Interpretation 2 reveals that there is a link between “the person” and the Prosecutor General, but there is no connection between “the person” and the Constitutional Court. It was observed that there was an extension of the expression in Interpretation 3 to allow “the person” to submit a motion directly to the Constitutional Court. The study shows signif icantly contrastive views between the academics and the Constitutional Court.