Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Amphoe vs. King Amphoe creation gazette announcements

When the creation of Galyani Vadhana district was announced last month, due to the Christmas vacation two Thai Wikipedians beat me to add the official creation to the article on Wikipedia. As they also added that the act to create the district was signed by HM the King it made look into even more detail into the announcement than at first.

Looking on page 2 of the PDF at the end of the actual law text, one find the name of Prime Minister Abhisit (อภิสิทธิ์ เวชชาชีวะ), so I suspected that it was him who signed the act. In real however this is only the countersignature, and the Royal signature is at the beginning at the Royal emblem.

It gets more interesting when comparing this act with the other two recent district creations, the minor district Wiang Kao and the upgrades of the minor districts in 2007.
While the minor district does not require the Royal signature, the upgrade of minor districts does, same as the creation of a district from scratch. This can be found for many decades already, but I now learned that the "State Administration Act of 1991" (ระเบียบบริหารราชการแผ่นดิน พ.ศ. ๒๕๓๔) is requiring it to be this way.
มาตรา ๖๑ ในจังหวัดหนึ่งให้มีหน่วยราชการบริหารรองจากจังหวัดเรียกว่า อำเภอ
การตั้ง ยุบ และเปลี่ยนเขตอำเภอ ให้ตราเป็นพระราชกฤษฎีกา

Paragraph 61: In one province it has administration offices subordinate of the province named Amphoe. To create, abolish or change area of a Amphoe is done by a Royal Decree.
Since the districts creations before 1991 already follow the same system, this paragraph must have been inherited from an older act, superseded by the new act.

As with the local administration act, I also found this act at pub-law.net, and thus can try my luck with Google translate and others to find more interesting items on the district administration.

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