Section 264: Two-Year Bar on Refiling a Pardon Petition
Statutory text (Thai original)
เรื่องราวขอพระราชทานอภัยโทษอย่างอื่นซึ่งมิใช่โทษประหารชีวิต ถ้าถูกยกหนหนึ่งแล้ว จะยื่นใหม่อีกไม่ได้จนกว่าจะพ้นสองปีนับแต่วันถูกยกครั้งก่อน
English translation
A petition requesting a royal pardon in respect of a penalty other than the death penalty, if it has once been rejected, may not be submitted again until two years have elapsed from the date of the previous rejection.
This English translation is provided for reference only and has not yet been firm-verified. Always rely on the Thai original.
Firm annotation
This section imposes a waiting period to prevent repeated pardon petitions for the same non-capital penalty. Once a petition has been rejected, section 264 bars any fresh petition for two years measured from the date of the previous rejection. It complements section 262, which limits a death-penalty petition to a single submission, and reflects the same policy of preventing the clemency process from being used to stall enforcement indefinitely. Read with section 263, which confirms enforcement continues throughout, the practical picture is that a rejected petitioner keeps serving the sentence and must wait two years to try again.
Why this matters in practice
The deadline here is unforgiving: a rejected non-capital petition locks out any refiling for two full years, so a first petition should be as strong as it can be rather than treated as a trial run. Track the rejection date carefully, because the two-year clock runs from it. Because the sentence continues to run in the meantime under section 263, there is rarely any tactical advantage in a rushed, weak petition. If you are timing or preparing a fresh petition, an online consultation with a Thai lawyer can confirm when the bar lifts and how to strengthen the submission.
Cited in 3 Supreme Court decisions (1971 to 2004)
Selected citing decisions
- Decision 2954/2547 (2004)
- Decision 5599/2541 (1998)
- Decision 1700/2514 (1971)
This list is selected automatically, weighted towards judgments that turn on this section rather than ones that merely recite it when passing sentence. It has not yet been reviewed by the firm.
Most often cited alongside
Sections that appear in the same judgments as this one most often. The figure is the number of decisions.
Counted across the firm's corpus of 83,652 Supreme Court decisions, 1921 to 2026. The count is complete; the stated year range trims rare outliers so it describes where the citations actually sit. These figures are computed by us and are not official court statistics. How we count these, and what we measured
Frequently asked questions
How soon can I refile a pardon petition after it is rejected?
For a non-death penalty, section 264 bars a new petition until two years have passed from the date the previous petition was rejected.
When does the two-year waiting period start?
It runs from the date the earlier petition was rejected, not from sentencing or from when you first filed.
Related guides on ThaiLawOnline
Cite this section
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Plain citation
Criminal Procedure Code, s. 264 (Thailand) -
Academic citation
Criminal Procedure Code (Thailand), s. 264. ThaiLawOnline, https://www.thailawonline.com/thai-criminal-procedure-code/section-264/ (accessed 11 August 2026). -
Thai citation
ป.วิ.อ. มาตรา 264 -
Permalink
https://www.thailawonline.com/thai-criminal-procedure-code/section-264/ -
Embed on your site
<blockquote cite="https://www.thailawonline.com/thai-criminal-procedure-code/section-264/"><p>A petition requesting a royal pardon in respect of a penalty other than the death penalty, if it has once been rejected, may not be submitted again until two years have elapsed from the date of the previous rejection.</p><footer>Criminal Procedure Code, s. 264 (Thailand) — <a href="https://www.thailawonline.com/thai-criminal-procedure-code/section-264/">ThaiLawOnline</a></footer></blockquote>
The Thai text is authoritative. The English is an unofficial translation by ThaiLawOnline, free to reuse with attribution.