Relatives of people who have been killed should be granted access to full postmortem examination results, a seminar on autopsy law reform was told yesterday.
Current laws concerning postmortem examinations needed to be altered in several areas, Somchai Homlaor, a member of the Law Reform Commission of Thailand, said.
Mr Somchai was speaking at a public hearing concerning law reform organised by the commission and the Asia Foundation.
As the law stands, relatives of a dead person involved in a criminal case cannot access autopsy results until the case has been finalised. They can only see a brief report by a doctor about the cause of death when they collect a body from hospital.
In several countries, autopsy examinations investigate the causes of death for the sake of public safety but, in Thailand, they focus only on crime cases.
Pikul Prohmchan, a representative of a network of relatives of dead and missing people, said it was important to allow the relatives of dead people to have access to postmortem examination results, especially when police were involved in the death.
She said her grandchild was killed after learning that some police officers were involved in the illicit drug trade. She wanted to move her grandchild to have an autopsy performed but it was difficult to do so since, by law, an autopsy on a body must be performed in the district where the person died.
Ms Pikul suggested funds be set aside to help relatives of victims in criminal cases who had to keep the victim's body at the hospital during the process of finding out the truth about the death.
Hospitals charge relatives up to 1,800 baht per day to keep a corpse in storage, she said.
Anukul Aweaputeh, a representative of the Muslim Attorney Centre Foundation, said in some cases in Pattani in which security officers were alleged to have killed villagers, forensic officials took many hours to arrive at the scene of the death. That had resulted in distrust among villagers about the results of the autopsy because the body and environmental conditions could change during the lapsed time.
Another issue in the postmortem examination practice in the deep South was the Muslim belief that a dead body should not be disturbed by an autopsy despite the fact that it could benefit both security authorities and the families of victims, he said.
He suggested that doctors who are responsible for conducting autopsies on Muslim victims should be Muslim.
Suranarong Srisuwan, a specialist with the Central Institute of Forensic Science, said although the institute always voluntarily allowed the relatives of the victim to observe the autopsy to improve transparency of the examination, it should be stated in the law that relatives of the victim must be notified before the autopsy begins.
The current law simply requires authorities to notify at least one relative of the victim "if possible", Dr Suranarong said.