Thai Prime Minister Prayuth can continue in office, top court rules

 

Thailand’s Constitutional Court has ruled that Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha can continue in office and that he had not surpassed his maximum eight-year term limit as premier. 

Prayuth’s critics had argued that his time in office should be calculated from 2014, when he took power as army commander in the aftermath of a coup that removed Thailand’s elected Pheu Thai party government. 

In a surprise move, Prayuth was suspended as prime minister in August by the Constitutional Court, which had accepted a petition from Thailand’s political opposition calling for it to rule on whether the premier had exhausted his time in office. 

Prawit and Prayuth are former army commanders and were comrades in arms for decades. Mark Cogan, associate professor of peace and conflict studies at Kansai Gaidai University in Japan, said earlier on Friday that a likely scenario would be the court ruling that Prayuth’s term started with the new constitution in 2017.