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THAILAND: Taking Lese-Majeste Laws Seriously

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Dec 29 2008 (IPS) - Until late August, Harry Niccolaides was just one of thousands of foreigners working in Thailand as English teachers. But now the 41-year-old Australian national is behind bars, charged with violating this kingdom’s draconian lese majeste laws.

It is small comfort to Niccolaides that 2008 marks 100 years since the laws were incorporated into the country’s criminal code. The laws allow for a maximum jail term of 15 years for anyone found insulting or defaming the Thai monarchy through words or actions.

In Niccolaides’ case it was an obscure novel that he had published in 2005. Few people in Thailand had heard of this 226-page work, titled ‘Verisimilitude’, for obvious reasons: it had a print run of only 50 books, of which, according to Niccolaides, seven were actually sold.

What got the aspiring novelist into trouble were 103 words in the book that make reference to the lifestyle of a fictional member of a royal family. A Kafkaesque nightmare followed with four appeals for bail by Niccolaides being turned down by the Bangkok criminal court since he was charged on Aug. 31.

‘’My mood fluctuates; sometimes I get depressed,’’ Niccolaides said from behind bars at the visitor’s centre of the remand prison. ‘’I share a cell with 60 men; there is no ventilation. I use a facemask because of TB (tuberculosis), because they say that one in 10 people here has TB.’’

‘’I am very concerned because I think I am being manipulated,’’ he added during an IPS interview. ‘’I want to offer an explanation in court that I did not want to offend the monarchy.’’

The predicament Niccolaides faces is shared by others too – though not all of them are in prison. The list of Thais who have had lese-majeste charges levelled against them in 2008 include a former government minister, a political activist, a media mogul, a respected Buddhist philosopher and a student.

Jonathan Head, the Bangkok correspondent for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), has had three lese-majeste charges filed against him.

Being named on such an infamous list is far from comforting in a country where the monarch, King Bhumibol Adulyadej, enjoys semi-divine status. Others protected by the lese-majeste laws are the queen and the heir apparent.

‘’After the charges were filed against me I lost friends and places that would invite me as a guest lecturer stopped doing so,’’ says Jakrapob Penkair, the former government minister. ‘’Even politicians in my own party avoided me; they saw me as dangerous. My business partner didn’t want to have any more dealings.’’

‘’Suddenly my world here began to shrink,’’ he explained in an interview about the case that forced him to resign from political office in mid-2008. The 40-year-old was charged for the contents of a speech about the politics of patronage he had delivered in August 2007 at the Bangkok-based Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Thailand.

And in a country where anybody can make a lese-majeste charge – it is relatively easy to do so – some see such actions as a meritorious act to protect the highest institution of the kingdom.

‘’Nobody was brave enough to make the charges. I put the evidence together and made the charge,’’ says police Lt. Col. Wattanasak Mungkandee of his role in going after Jakrapob. ‘’I wanted to set an example for others to be brave enough to stop people from committing lese-majeste.’’

Wattanasak, moreover, has filed cases not as a police officer, but a private citizen. The procedure begins with a complaint in a police station that triggers an inquiry, after which charges are filed in court if there is sufficient evidence. ‘’There is no time limit for this kind of inquiry into the case. It can take three months,’’ Wattanasak told IPS.

Wattanasak’s crusade is matched by other efforts in Thailand to protect the monarchy. The ongoing political turmoil in the country pitting those sympathetic to the ousted fugitive prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra against his royalist, conservative opponents have seen strident calls for stricter lese-majeste laws, including moves to increase the jail term of violators to 20 years.

‘’The punishment keeps getting worse and worse here for lese-majeste, while in other countries that have constitutional monarchies it keeps getting obsolete,’’ says David Streckfuss, a U.S. academic who has written extensively on this law. ‘’The law has been revised or rarely used in England, Norway, and Nepal -when it still was a monarchy.’’

‘’This makes Thailand unique among other constitutional monarchies,’’ he told IPS of a law that entered the criminal code a century ago when Thailand was known as Siam and it was still an absolute monarchy. ‘’The most number of arrests from lese-majeste in a single year was in 1977, when there were 36 cases.’’

The culture of fear that the law breeds emerged after the 1908 criminal code declared that those found guilty of lese-majeste could get a seven-year jail term. A change in the law, with a tougher sentence of 15 years, followed a bloody crackdown on pro-democracy activists in 1976.

The law has proved useful for some Thais to target political enemies, to suppress free speech or as a tool by the country’s legion of military dictators to silence critics. The post-World War Two military dictator Sarit Thanarat is still remembered for breathing new life into the lese-majeste law by using it in an ‘’aggressive manner.’’

Yet for victims like Niccolaides, the Australian, even such pointers are absent. He is still to learn who brought the lese-majeste charge against him and who he offended. ‘’Some people are saying these are trumped up charges,’’ he says. ‘’I don’t know.’’