Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing well, a lot of folks come to Thailand and presume Common Law notions operate here in Thailand. I have seen this a lot; we have discussed this at length in prior videos where we explain the notion of equity and what in my tradition, American law though it goes back into the Common Law tradition where you had the Courts of Chancery as opposed to the Courts of Law, and I'm not going to do a deep dive into that, but what we are talking about here is just there are a lot of concepts in the Common Law that I really don't think many expats realize exist until they live in a jurisdiction that doesn't have those concepts. It is just not in the thinking on jurisprudence. It is just sort of not part of that jurisdiction's paradigm if you will. 

The reason I thought of making this video is there was a chain of comments on a recent video and I thought it was worth noting. I am going to go ahead and quote directly. So commenter one: "I emailed the Consulate General Office of Thailand here in my province in Canada and they replied today stating if I am in Thailand for less than 60 days, a Tourist Visa would be all I needed to make YouTube videos. I am not sure why 60 days is the magic number but I have officially heard it from the horse's mouth sort of speak, (I think they meant so to speak). I think I will carry a copy of the email when I visit the Kingdom in a few months just in case." The response to that, commenter two said, yes because Thai Authorities are beholden to the off the cuff advice their Consulate General Offices abroad dispense. Good luck with that." (I am going to come back to that comment, hold on a second). Commenter three, who I think was the original commenter: "That is what I am afraid of" (and then there's like an emoji of like an afraid face) and then finally and this is kind of the one that I thought was most pertinent. Quoting directly: "The Consulate," (and this is a different commenter) "the Consulate General Offices are an arm of the National Government. If taken to Court, such a document would be enough to offer reasonable doubt that an offense was committed." Okay, couple of things here. First off, kind of sarcastic, but fair point. I have discussed this at length many times; I have discussed this in the context of the US Embassy as well so it's not just the Thai Embassies. I have seen this a lot. People that work in an Embassy or a Consulate they know a lot oftentimes and they are oftentimes well trained in certain aspects of their own Immigration Law and regulatory rules associated with that but they are not the Oracle of all things Law and I know that's hard to grasp for folks. I used to have this issue oftentimes I saw a couple of different times in 15 years, it wasn't real frequent, but I'd be down at the US Embassy, primarily not at the Embassy side but when I was at the old USCIS Office here in Bangkok, there were some officers that would just say "Hey I can't dispense legal advice," and quite honestly that is the right answer. And there was some officers that would just start talking off the cuff about how things worked and they were wrong, they were dead wrong. I knew they were wrong and in fact I had done cases that never worked that way, that's not the way that it worked. Not their fault particularly, they are just commenting on something that is beyond their bailiwick quite honestly. It is sort of beyond their scope of service and kind of their scope of understanding. This isn't meant to sort of denigrate anybody at the Consulates or anything, not my point at all. It's just again as that commenter said, an off the cuff comment from a Consulate is not compelling to a Police Officer in Thailand, two totally different things, okay? I also have to wonder if the message that was, and I now remember the context of the video these comments were made under. We were talking about Work Permits for YouTubers in Thailand which that's a clear yes. We have discussed this at length, the analysis is there if you are doing YouTubing in Thailand, yeah you need a Work Permit. That's really the only way I can look at it. The Consulate has nothing to do with work authorization and Labour Law here in Thailand, that is the Department of Labour, the Labour Department, they deal with that and it is under the auspices of the Ministry of Interior as is Thai Immigration here. So yeah again, not the best idea to just sort of take somebody's off the cuff notion abroad and think that it can be applied here because they are two different things. Consulates and Embassies operate under the auspices of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, not the Ministry of Interior that deals with things internal to Thailand. 

Now leaving that aside, again quoting this directly: "The Consulate General Offices are an arm of the National Government. If taken to Court, such a document could be enough to offer reasonable doubt that an offense was committed." Well no, no, that's not the case. It is far more nuanced than that. First of all as we previously discussed, yes the Foreign Ministry is part of the National Government obviously. They are under the auspices of the Government of the Kingdom of Thailand, yeah they are the Foreign Ministry, they are the Royal Thai Foreign Ministry. An Embassy is the Royal Thai Embassy, for this example in Canada, or the Royal Thai Consulate in whatever specific city that we are talking about. Yeah they are part of the National Government but you have got to understand, this is not America; this is not a Common Law Jurisdiction, it does not work the way that you think it works. What this person I think is talking about is the concept of 'statements by a party opponent made against a party opponent'. In the Common Law tradition, at least in the American Common Law tradition associated with evidence, it is not even an exception to the hearsay rule, it is just not hearsay when a party opponent makes a declaration of something. So if two people are in a lawsuit against each other and one person who is in the lawsuit who is the plaintiff for example, says out on the street "hey this whole lawsuit is a lie. I don't really believe what I am saying against this person", that can immediately be used against that person in Court whether the other person heard it, it came through a third party, whatever. Again statements by a party opponent made against a party opponent are not hearsay and I think that is the concept this person is talking about. Meanwhile, they say "if taken to Court such a document could be enough to offer reasonable doubt that an offense was committed". "Reasonable doubt" is a term of art from the Common Law tradition. That has not got anything to do with how things are going to operate here in Thailand. Moreover, going back to the issue of 'statements by a party opponent made against a party opponent' the Thai legal system is not adversarial, it's inquisitorial. They are not looking at it as some fight between you and the Government. All the Thai Court would want to look at under those circumstances is what the law says and what the facts are, and as we have discussed in many videos on this channel previously, the law has been clear as to what "work" is which is virtually anything, and foreigners have to have a Work Permit in order to get engaged in work in Thailand. YouTubing can be deemed and is deemed, in my opinion based on the fact that it is basically anything, it's any activity, is deemed to be work and therefore those engaging in it whether paid or not would need to obtain a Work Permit. Now do I agree with that policy overall? Not necessarily, not my point though. The point is, that type of analysis, that Common Law type of analysis is not how the Thai Legal system works. I am not saying I even know how it would work out as we have discussed many times on this channel. I am an American Attorney, I'm not a Thai Attorney. I am a naturalized Thai citizen, I am the Managing Director of the firm and I have had extensive experience analyzing and working with Thai Attorneys to understand the ramifications of Thai Law and this video has been reviewed by one of the Attorney staff, I am not saying anything that is off base here and this is for educational purposes only but understand, imposing, sort of grafting a Common Law analysis framework onto the Thai System, that can lead to a lot of places where you don't want to end up because you are making assumptions about the way things work when they may not work that way and they maybe work wildly differently from how they actually work. So this video was not made in any attempt to point anybody out. It has been made because I saw that thread and I said Wow, I need to make a video to kind of get people into the right mind frame for dealing with the legal system here in the Kingdom of Thailand.