Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance Phumtham Wechayachai announced yesterday (25 December) that the Cabinet’s Constitutional Amendment Committee will propose 3 referendums on constitutional amendments and that the first will ask whether people want to amend the Constitution without amending chapters relating to the monarchy.

The parliament has voted against a Move Forward Party (MFP) proposal to hold a referendum on whether a Constitution Drafting Assembly (CDA) should be elected to draft a new constitution.

The campaign to petition for a constitutional amendment referendum faces potential delay as the Election Commission of Thailand (ECT) told the the People’s Constitution Drafting Group, just hours after the petition gained the required number of signatures, that online forms will not be accepted and all 50,000 must be collected on paper.

<p>The Constitutional Court has accepted a petition asking it to rule whether Prime Minister Gen Prayut Chan-o-cha&rsquo;s time in office is up due to the 8-year maximum term limit for a Prime Minister imposed by the 2017 Constitution, and suspended him from office until a ruling is made.</p>

<p>The Constitution Advocacy Alliance (CALL), a civil society network campaigning for constitutional amendments, has condemned the constitutional amendment committee for barring them from conducting a Facebook live recording of their meetings and having security officers take them away.</p>

<p>The public joined the Committee Campaigning for a People&rsquo;s Constitution (CCPC) on Wednesday 24 June in remembering the 1932 People&rsquo;s Party&rsquo;s declaration and demanding amendments to the 2017 constitution. Meanwhile, other commemorations faced difficulties from the authorities.</p>

<p>On Friday morning (13 March), a group of civil society organizations and members of the public, led by the Committee Campaigning for a People&rsquo;s Constitution (CCPC), iLaw, and the People Go Network Forum, marched to parliament to submit a petition demanding an amendment to the 2017 Constitution.</p>

<p>&quot;Talk for Freedom,&quot; a new documentary by iLaw and Prachatai, tells the story of Mafang and Pai Dao Din, two of the participants in the Talk for Freedom public forum on the draft of the 2017 constitution in&nbsp;Khon Kaen.&nbsp;</p>

<p>On Wednesday (19 February), the Constitutional Court of Thailand ruled that Section 301 of the Thai Criminal Code which criminalizes abortion, violates the current Constitution and must be amended.&nbsp;</p>

<p>2019 is counted as the year when the arc of Thai politics was most striking since it was a time of transition from the &lsquo;dark era&rsquo; under almost 5 years of the NCPO to the &lsquo;hazy era&rsquo; after the election (which had been postponed 6 times) under the 2017 Constitution whose complicated design locked politics into a multilayered parliamentary system, and the Future Forward Party emerged to strongly challenge the old system.</p>

<p>The Constitutional Court has accepted a petition by the Future Forward Party against 32 MPs out of 41 for holding shares in media companies, but they are not suspended as MPs.</p>