Supreme Court rules Prachatai webmaster guilty

The Supreme Court upheld the lower courts’ sentence of a suspended eight-month jail term and a fine of Bt20,000 against Chiranuch Premchaiporn, the director of Prachatai.
Like the lower courts, the highest court found Chiranuch guilty of violating Article 14 and Article 15 of the 2007 Computer Crimes Act, as alleged by public prosecutors, for failing to promptly remove lese majeste comments from the Prachatai website in 2008.
On March 31 2010, public prosecutors filed the charges against her in the Criminal Court. The suit alleged that Chiranuch, as the webmaster, intentionally supported or allowed others 10 posts defaming the monarchy on her website from April 15 to November 3, 2008.
The suit alleged that as the webmaster, Chiranuch failed to carry out her responsibility to prevent the appearance of false information on her website. She was found to have violated Article 14 and Article 15 of the Computer Crimes Act.
The Criminal Court found Chiranuch guilty on May 30, 2012, and sentenced her to one year in jail and slapped her with a fine of Bt30,000. But penalties were reduced by one-third to an eight-month jail term and a Bt20,000 fine. The jail term was suspended for one year.
The public prosecutors sought harsher penalties from the Appeals Court while Chiranuch appealed to reverse the ruling.
On November 8, 2013, the Appeals Court upheld the ruling and sentence of the Criminal Court. Chiranuch took her appeal against the ruling to the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court ruled that Chiranuch was in charge of the website so she must have known about the lese majeste comments posted there. Since she did not take action to remove them, her inaction was deemed as intentional consent to allow the information to remain on her website.
Like the lower court, the Supreme Court commuted the penalties from one-year imprisonment to eight months in jail and a fine of Bt20,000. The jail term was suspended for a year.
Paiboon Amornpin-yokiat, cyber law specialist and legal adviser to the Thai Online News Providers Association, said the ruling would impact online service providers like e-commerce websites, social media portals and web-boards, which allow users to post comments.
He suggested such sites adjust their comments monitoring system to ensure they were quick to remove controversial material.
To prevent falling foul of legal action, they could also tighten their terms and conditions, declare a time limit within which controversial comments would be taken down, and offer users a means by which to contest the deletion of their posts, he said.
Meanwhile, Amnesty Inter-national said the court’s de-cision highlighted how the Thai authorities were using and abusing a range of laws to enforce direct
censorship and impose a climate
of self-censorship.
“Since the military coup in 2014, Internet service providers and media outlets have operated under increasingly sweeping restrictions. They are under pressure from authorities to cooperate and steer clear of comments deemed unfavourable,” said Philip Luther, Amnesty International’s acting senior director for research.
“The Computer Crimes Act is a flawed piece of legislation that has become another weapon in the authorities’ arsenal to silence dissent. It should repealed immediately or amended and brought
into line with international
human rights law and standards,” he added.