Graphic design by zerotwostudio
We would like to close out the 2023 Annual Report with a maze for bailors, the category we put in the last place, though the tribulations of this Fund began (befell!) in the first place because of bailing duties which were first taken up by an auntie who later brought on another auntie, followed by the christening of “the Ratsadonprasong Fund” to honor the will of the people, and eventually the government registration as “the Siddhi-Issara Foundation” to safeguard the fund until its mission’s expiration date.
In that initial stage of the fund, after the coup in 2014, the position of a bailor emerged simply enough in order to guarantee that people have access to the right to bail while fighting their case. While there already existed a lawyers’ organization that received human rights-related funding for its expenses including the hiring of many lawyers to do the job of legal defense, that funding did not cover bail. So people had to rely on crowdfunding from fellow citizens to afford it; this last resort came to prove the power of people’s volunteerism. Still, somebody was required to do the bailor’s job, to stand by at all times, ready to travel to any court to post the bail. For this job there was no budget, no compensation, and no exclusion of certain freedom-related cases on the basis of any “disqualifying” articles of the Criminal Code, provided that the law stood by the presumption of innocence principle until proven guilty.
Then, in 2021, with daily protests and mass arrests, the situation was no longer manageable for the two original bailors of the fund. We had to ask lawyers to fill in the bailor role in a number of cases. Once protests at Din Daeng flared up, the lawyers’ organization requested that the fund recruit additional bailors to stand by, leading to the fund’s next generation bailors, three of whom were given a flat-rate compensation by the lawyers’ organization (now the number is down to two).
Having the next-gen bailors helped reduce the heavy caseload on the two original bailors, reduce the dependency on lawyers, and reduce the necessity of relying on the two original bailors’ personal networks in an event of emergency. Later, we also built a team of additional bailors to take care of bail requests in Bangkok, the adjacent provinces, and the far-flung regions. The Siddhi-Issara Foundation pays these additional next-gen bailors through its own operations budget; we do not take money from the Ratsadonprasong Fund to compensate bailors for their work.
The slide “Bailor Breakdown” divides the 105 bailors in our database into 5 categories and shows the responsibilities shared among them: original fund bailors, next-gen fund bailors, parents or relatives, personal network, and lawyers.
At the end of 2023, the two original bailors of the fund were still responsible for 182 defendants in 33 cases (averaging 91 defendants per bailor!), whereas the next-gen bailors were responsible for 260 defendants in 135 cases (averaging 32.5 defendants per bailor).
Note that the category with the most members at 71 bailors (parents or relatives) were mostly requested by Juvenile and Family Courts to act as the bailor for a child defendant; outside of that were family members whom we had to ask to step in temporarily during a period of emergency.
With bailors from all sorts of backgrounds, the fund has had to take on the role of a creditor with whom the bailors sign a contract promising that they will return the money immediately or within two days after the court wires it back to their account. The fund’s staff, meanwhile, have turned into debt collectors who have had to coax those bailors who broke their promise into paying. This has happened with parents/relatives, lawyers, and one next-gen bailor.
The courts’ financial system is not always reliable, either. When it’s the court who fails to wire the bail money back within the time limit set by official judicial regulations (the longest wait in our record was 8 months!), the bailor has to keep following up with the court. Several times, the follow-up was so convoluted that the most efficient way to proceed was for the bailor to travel to court herself to request the problem “case file” from the records room and submit it to the court’s finance department. (One time, a bailor had to travel for hours across province lines to request a case file from the records room on the second floor of a court, then walk downstairs to submit it to the finance room in the same building, so that the finance department could finally process the bail return after months of phone calls to no avail.)
These follow-ups and delaying tactics we have had to deal with are condensed into the slides “How to Get Bail Back”: one flowchart for expectation, another for reality.
Our final maze is the ramifications of defendants breaking their promise. The slide “How to Not Get Bail Back” puts together the various paths to bail forfeitures and fines after a defendant no-showed on a court date, including both the cases where the bailor could track down the defendant and later bring them to appear in court, and the cases where the bailor could only appear alone before the law to listen to the court order the seizure of the money.
At present, with 2024 drawing to a close, as the cases for which we posted bail are steadily concluding, the right to bail is being reduced in significance when almost all the current detainees are in prison after a guilty sentencing resulting either from their confession during trial or from losing their case in court at any of the levels from the Court of the First Instance, the Court of Appeal, to the Supreme Court. This is not what we expected during the early days of the fund; we simply stepped in to bail people out so they could fight their case to the fullest extent of the law. Now that things turned out this way, the Foundation has had to expand its legally stated objectives so that we can provide long-term assistance in prison as well as to the families of detainees for the purposes of rehabilitation. We have been doing so consistently already, as can be seen in our Thai-language weekly reports to donors.
If at this point you remain stuck in a maze, whatever the maze may be, know that we are stuck just like you. We promise that we’ll be your company to the end, whichever end yours turns out to be, and regardless of the relevance or irrelevance assigned to the bailor’s place nowadays.
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