Section 269: False certification by a member of a profession
Statutory text (Thai original)
ผู้ใดในการประกอบการงานในวิชาแพทย์ กฎหมาย บัญชีหรือวิชาชีพอื่นใด ทำคำรับรองเป็นเอกสารอันเป็นเท็จ โดยประการที่น่าจะเกิดความเสียหายแก่ผู้อื่นหรือประชาชน ต้องระวางโทษจำคุกไม่เกินสองปี หรือปรับไม่เกินสี่หมื่นบาทหรือทั้งจำทั้งปรับ ผู้ใดโดยทุจริตใช้หรืออ้างคำรับรองอันเกิดจากการกระทำความผิดตามวรรคแรก ต้องระวางโทษเช่นเดียวกัน
English translation
Whoever, in carrying on work in the profession of medicine, law, accountancy, or any other profession, makes a false certification in a document, in a manner likely to cause damage to another person or to the public, shall be liable to imprisonment not exceeding two years, or a fine not exceeding forty thousand baht, or both.
Whoever dishonestly uses or refers to a certification arising from the commission of an offence under paragraph one shall be liable to the same penalty.
ThaiLawOnline translation, written from the Thai original and verified
Firm annotation
Section 269 closes the Chapter on Offences Relating to Documents by reaching professional certifications. Paragraph one has three elements: (1) the offender is carrying on work in a profession, expressly medicine, law, or accountancy, and by the closing words any other profession; (2) the offender makes a certification in a document that is false; and (3) the manner is likely to cause damage to another person or to the public. This is not forgery. The document is genuine and the offender is entitled to issue it; the wrong lies in the falsity of what is certified. That distinguishes Section 269 from Sections 264 to 266, and from Section 267, where the falsity is introduced into an official record through a third party. Paragraph two extends liability to a person who dishonestly uses or refers to a certification obtained through paragraph one, mirroring the structure of Section 268, and note that paragraph two alone requires dishonesty as a separate mental element.
Why this matters in practice
This is the provision that bites when a medical certificate is issued without any examination, when an accountant signs off on figures known to be untrue, or when a professional certifies a signature or a state of affairs he has not checked. The criminal exposure is modest, up to two years, but a conviction is normally fatal to the professional licence, and the disciplinary consequence outweighs the criminal one. Paragraph two matters to clients: the person who knowingly uses the false certificate commits the offence too, so commissioning a convenient certificate is not safe merely because a professional signed it. Where the certificate is used to obtain money or an official benefit, fraud under Section 341 or Section 267 is normally charged alongside.
Cited in 19 Supreme Court decisions (1969 to 2024)
Selected citing decisions
- Decision 1488/2567 (2024)
- Decision 3635/2546 (2003)
- Decision 1550/2512 (1969)
- Decision 9072-9074/2549 (2006)
- Decision 12582/2547 (2004)
- Decision 2048/2547 (2004)
- Decision 5548/2545 (2002)
- Decision 3942/2529 (1986)
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
- Section 83 15
- Section 91 13
- Section 90 11
- Section 264 10
- Section 268 9
- Section 86 6
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
Cite this section
-
Plain citation
Penal Code, s. 269 (Thailand) -
Academic citation
Penal Code (Thailand), s. 269. ThaiLawOnline, https://www.thailawonline.com/thai-penal-code/section-269/ (accessed 8 August 2026). -
Thai citation
ป.อ. มาตรา 269 -
Permalink
https://www.thailawonline.com/thai-penal-code/section-269/ -
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<blockquote cite="https://www.thailawonline.com/thai-penal-code/section-269/"><p>Whoever, in carrying on work in the profession of medicine, law, accountancy, or any other profession, makes a false certification in a document, in a manner likely to cause damage to another person or to the public, shall be liable to imprisonment not exceeding two…</p><footer>Penal Code, s. 269 (Thailand) — <a href="https://www.thailawonline.com/thai-penal-code/section-269/">ThaiLawOnline</a></footer></blockquote>
The Thai text is authoritative. The English is an unofficial translation by ThaiLawOnline, free to reuse with attribution.