A proposal by National Reform Council whips to invite outsiders to the constitution drafting committee appears unlikely to succeed.
Wanchai Sornsiri, an NRC member for legal and justice affairs, said on Saturday that the majority of the whips favoured nominating five outsiders to the charter drafting panel. The proposal will be forwarded to the NRC meeting on Monday for consideration.
However, the majority of the 250-member reform council will have the final say on the issue, he added.
The charter drafting committee will have 36 members, 20 of whom will be drawn from the NRC, which was hand-picked by the senior military officers running the country.
The whips last Wednesday voted 11-8 to invite five outsiders to sit on the drafting committee under the NRC quota, said Mr Wanchai.
The majority was led by Alongkorn Ponlaboot, an NRC member for energy reform and a former Democrat MP.
Mr Wanchai said he had gauged the views of other NRC members and found that most were not in favour of outsiders. They wanted all the charter drafters to be picked from the NRC.
The outsiders to be invited were not specified, but it is believed that they could include representatives of political parties or groups such as the People's Democratic Reform Committee (PDRC) and the red-shirt United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship (UDD).
Many NRC members believe that since political partisans were the chief cause of the problems that led to the May 22 coup, they should be kept out of the drafting process.
The NRC is likely to select all 20 charter drafters from its ranks at Monday’s meeting. If the number included five outsiders, then the total from the NRC would be only 15, one less than the quota of 16 assigned to the National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO) and the cabinet.
The NCPO gave the NRC a quota of 20 so that it could to play the lead role in the charter drafting process, many members argue. Giving five seats to others would compromise that role, they say.
In any case, said Mr Wanchai, the 250-member NRC comprised representatives from various groups, including sympathisers of conflicting political groups such as the UDD and the PDRC. Therefore it would not be necessary to bring more outsiders to the drafting committee.