Tuesday, March 4, 2008

Gazette announcements and their date of being effective - the answer

Last month I had wondered about what date some of the announcements in the Royal Gazette get effective, when the actual date is not mentioned. Now I found the answer by accident - I was looking at the Thai copyright act from 1994, and the second point in that English translation is as follows:
This Act shall come into force on the expiration of 90 days from the date of publication in the Government Gazette.
As my Thai reading is still so bad I did not try to read the complete announcements yet, I usually just looked for the names of the entities and the dates written explicitly. So, I rechecked the announcement of the previous post - the upgrade of minor districts in 1997. And voilà, it also contains a second point, which in Thai reads:
พระราชกฤษฎีกานี้ให้ใช้บังคับเมื่อพ้นกำหนดสิบห้าวันนับแต่วันประกาศในราชกิจจานุเบกษาเป็นต้นไป
This simply says that the announcement becomes effective 15 days after publication - to make it most difficult to spot for me they wrote the 15 in words (สิบห้า) instead of in Thai numerals (๑๕) like for all other numbers. And 15 days after the publication date of September 26 is exactly the October 11 which was listed in amphoe.com. At least one miracle solved...

No comments: