Thailand's deposed PM Yingluck expected to appear in court today as trial begins

Thailand's first female prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra is expected to appear in court today for the start of a negligence trial which could see her jailed for a decade.

It is the latest legal move against Yingluck, sister of fugitive billionaire ex-premier Thaksin Shinawatra whose administration was toppled in a military coup nearly a year ago.

A guilty conviction could deliver a hammer blow to the political dominance of her family, but it also risks stirring up the powerful grassroots "Red Shirt" movement that supports her family but has remained largely inactive since the military took over.

Yingluck is accused of criminal negligence over a populist but economically disastrous rice subsidy scheme, which paid farmers in the rural Shinawatra heartland twice the market rate for their crops.
 
She is not accused of corruption but of failing to prevent alleged graft within the programme, which cost billions of dollars and galvanised the protests that eventually felled her elected government leading to last May's coup.

Thailand's military-appointed parliament impeached Yingluck in January over the scheme, a move which banned her from politics for five years.

"I believe a hawkish faction in the old powers... Wants to punish the Shinawatras as much as they can," Puangthong Pawakapan, a Thai politics expert at Chulalongkorn University, told AFP.

"But keeping her in prison will definitely anger the Red Shirts even more," she added.

Yingluck is expected to appear in person at the trial, which is being heard by the Supreme Court on the northern outskirts of Bangkok.

Thailand's Attorney General yesterday warned an arrest warrant would be issued if she failed to appear without good reason.

Yingluck herself has defended the controversial rice scheme as one which "lifted the quality of life for rice farmers" in the poor northeast of a country where subsidies to farmers have long been a cornerstone of Thai politics.

The army takeover last year was the latest twist in a decade of political turbulence that broadly pits a Bangkok-based elite, backed by parts of the military and judiciary, against poor urban and rural voters, particularly in the country's north, who are fiercely loyal to the Shinawatras.

Thaksin was himself toppled by a previous coup in 2006 and now lives in self-exile to avoid jail on a corruption charge.