Thailand military dictators abolish elections

This video says about itself:

Protesters in Thailand invoke Hunger Games

4 June 2014

Protesters in the Thai capital Bangkok have adopted a hand gesture from the film series The Hunger Games to express dissent against the military junta.

From daily The Morning Star in Britain:

Voters to have no say in selection of junta‘s new senate

Thursday 26th February 2015

A COMMITTEE appointed by Thailand’s military rulers said yesterday that the country’s new 200-member senate will be nominated and not directly elected by voters.

The new senators will be chosen from pools of candidates including former premiers, ex-military leaders and representatives from different professions, committee spokesman Lertrat Ratanavanich told reporters on Wednesday.

Drafting the new constitution is being carried out by the 36-person committee hand-picked by the junta after it overthrew the civilian government and abolished the last charter in last May’s coup.

Under the last constitution, half of the 150-member senate was directly elected and the rest appointed. Now, there will be no place for election.

The new senate structure has been designed to limit the power of elected politicians in the parliament.

It follows years of landslide electoral triumph by political parties allied with former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra’s Pheu Thai Party.

The power struggle between the military-backed upper and middle class and Thaksin’s pro-democracy supporters has fuelled the sometimes violent political conflict over the past decade.

“There’s a likelihood that the Pheu Thai Party will win again once there’s an election, so they are designing the constitution to do whatever it takes to limit the power in parliament of the elected politicians,” warned Kan Yeunyong, executive director of the Bangkok-based think tank Siam Intelligence Unit.

Completed, the constitutional draft will be reviewed by the military-appointed national reform council, the cabinet and the junta leaders.

UNION investigators have found a catalogue of labour rights abuses on Thai fishing ships. An International Transport Workers Federation (ITF) team found that crews on industrial vessels in southern port Songkhla were subject to poor working conditions, cramped accommodation and long contracts, some of them with no hope of returning home with any pay: here.

THAILAND’S largest seafood company said yesterday it had cut ties with a major supplier following an investigation uncovering slave labour in the global fishing industry: here.