Pai Dao Din singled out – yet not alone

Jatupat Boonphatthararaksa, the anti-junta activist popularly known as Pai Dao Din, is facing up to 15 years in prison if convicted of lese majeste as charged. He is accused under the Computer Crimes Act of violating, with a post on Facebook, the law protecting the country’s revered monarchy. The military junta that seized power in 2014 is showing its thin skin again. 
In line with past practice, the generals wasted no time, once in power, clamping down on any criticism or expression of dismay that they found objectionable as gauged by a highly dubious measuring stick.
Jatupat, a 25-year-old law student, reportedly re-posted a profile of His Majesty King Maha Vajiralongkorn originally published by the BBC Thai-language service on December 2. The post was deemed offensive and he was arrested the next day. The police had nothing to say about the post’s 2,800 other “shares” on Facebook, raising the suspicion that Jatupat, as a political activist affiliated with the New Democracy Movement, had been singled out for punishment. Nor was this the first time he’d been arrested because of his political views.
It’s also been reported that his arrest was triggered by a complaint from an Army officer stationed in Khon Kaen. Jatupat was released the next day on Bt400,000 bail, but Khon Kaen provincial court revoked bail on December 22, citing further “sarcastic remarks” he allegedly made online about the authorities.
Disturbingly, Jatupat’s lawyer was barred from a closed-door court hearing last Friday at which his client’s pre-trial detention period was extended by 12 days. The court also denied Jatupat permission to sit for exams essential to his graduation from Khon Kaen University.
What’s absent from this sad litany of government and judicial overreach is any acknowledgement that freedom of expression is protected under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which Thailand is a signatory. The lese majeste legislation poses several problems beyond what should be obvious to all. For one, it compels police officers to arrest perceived wrongdoers anytime a complaint is filed, regardless of the merits of the case. Failing to do so could leave the investigating officer open to a career-destroying accusation of being disloyal to the monarchy.
The government, led by the junta, seems not to understand that public faith in the justice system is at stake. If the generals grasped this, they would certainly act to have this case resolved as quickly as possible, rather than being drawn out in a glare of publicity. Meanwhile there’s also the uneasy matter of former schoolteacher Jomsap Saenmuangkhote, who most citizens, according to a survey, believe was wrongly imprisoned for vehicular manslaughter following a controversial police investigation.
There is a depressing connection between these two cases. The Jomsap affair isn’t political in nature, but politics needn’t be a factor in recognising police missteps as the blunders they are. Politics should not cloud this assessment.
If the police wish to claim they are merely enforcing the law, they also need to explain why 2,800 other (presumably Thai) Facebook users who shared the same information as Jatupat are not being prosecuted. Nor has the BBC service, the source of the article, been taken to task for a perceived insult against the King. We certainly don’t advocate charges being brought against the BBC, but the failure to do so – the evident unwillingness to do so – underlines a fundamental flaw in Thai law enforcement and in a society willing to tolerate its own perilous shortcomings.
Unless the simple expression of views on the social media is recognised by accepted standards as intentionally hurtful, it should never be the basis for criminal prosecution.