The Royal Forest Department has taken legal action against Pareena Kraikupt, a Palang Pracharath MP for Ratchaburi province for encroaching reserved forest land.
The move came after the Council of State, the government’s legal advisory body, ruled that reform land defined but not yet allocated to needy people remains reserved forest land.
The decision deals a big blow to the 44-year-old MP, who maintained that she simply farmed on reform land, for which the penalty for encroachment was not criminal.
The action comes after weeks of legal dithering by a number of government agencies about exactly what Ms Pareena might be guilty of. Critics said authorities appeared to be reluctant to take action against a government MP and member of an influential family. Her party has assigned a lawyer to help her with her case.
Under the complaints filed on Saturday, Ms Pareena was accused of illegally occupying most of the 665 rai of forest land under scrutiny.
Cheewaparb Cheewatham, director of a forest protection office and adviser to the Payak Prai team, said the department had filed three complaints with police in charge of natural resources and the environment at the Crime Suppression Division.
The first complaint involves 387 rai that the chicken farm in Chom Bung district occupies and targets Ms Pareena, as the owner of the Khao Son farm.
The second complaint involves a 207-rai adjacent cattle grazing area but does not specify the suspect for lack of clear evidence of ownership.
The third complaint covers another adjacent plot of 70 rai where eucalyptus trees are grown. No suspect is specified.
Mr Cheewaparb explained that although no suspect was named in two of the cases, the details of the complaints clearly showed how they were linked to the Khao Son farm.
He added that the department was confident the occupation of the land by Ms Pareena is not the intention of the law.
“She has no right nor qualifications to occupy it,” he said.
Ms Pareena has maintained that she was not guilty of encroaching on reserved forest land but admitted she might have done so unintentionally.
The problem in Ms Parrena’s case stems from overlapping areas of reform land under the jurisdiction of the Agriculture Ministry and forest land under the care of the Royal Forest Department.
A small part of her farmland is clearly forest land and the department had already taken legal action against her last year.
Her remaining farmland is an overlapping area between national forest and reform land that has yet to subdivided into plots and allocated.
There is no serious penalty for occupying reform land. Anyone found to have encroached on it will be evicted and the land returned for allocation to the needy.
But in the case of forest land, an encroacher will face a jail term, calculated by plot, of 4-20 years for a plot over 25 rai and 1-10 years for a smaller one.
The Royal Forest Department had asked the Council of State for guidance on how an overlapping area should be treated. It replied on Feb 11 that the status of forest land is not automatically revoked once it is declared a reform zone, and the department must take action to protect it.
It fully becomes reform land only when the land is handed over to the land reform committee to be alloted and allocated to needy people as the original law intended.