 |
| Wikimedia Commons |
With a lengthy and bruising presidential campaign finally
behind them, many Americans were probably surprised by the contrast they
encountered opening
the newspaper on January 10, 2013, to find reports that a Thai labor
activist had been sentenced to 10 years in prison for insulting Thailand’s
King.
The embattled activist, Somyot Pruksakasemsuk, tried to challenge Thailand’s infamous lèse-majesté law in court, and
it appears he failed, getting an additional year for libeling an army general.
The activist was the publisher of a newspaper containing two allegedly
defamatory articles, and his conviction followed another protestor’s sentencing
weeks earlier for violating the same law; the sentencing of a 61-year old
man, now dead, to 20 years imprisonment for sending text messages about the
Thai royal family; and the imprisonment
of an American citizen for translating an allegedly defamatory book about
the Thai King.
As international attention focuses on Thailand’s
still-vigorous enforcement of a law abandoned hundreds of years ago by the
United Kingdom and China and not used since World War II in Japan, human rights
organizations have taken notice. The NGO Freedom House called
Pruksakasemsuk’s sentencing “a devastating blow to freedom of expression and
internet freedom in Thailand [which] contradicts the constitution’s mandate to
protect human rights.” Deeply entwined with Thailand’s domestic politics,
enforcement of the libel law may to some extent reflect an ongoing struggle
between “red shirt” and “yellow shirt” political movements and a broader battle between
old and new. To the outside observer, the nuance is obscured and a broader
picture of halting democratic progress remains.
In particular, these laws may contravene the universal right
to expression guaranteed in the International Covenant on Civil and Political
Rights (ICCPR), which Thailand ratified in 1996. The ICCPR’s Section 19, Freedom
of Opinion and Expression, contains language seemingly at odds with a lèse-majesté
regime. According to ICCPR’s most recent General Comments,
“an attack on a person, because of the exercise of his or her freedom of
opinion or expression, including such forms of attack as arbitrary arrest,
torture, threats to life and killing, [cannot] be compatible with article 19.”
Frank La Rue, the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to
freedom of opinion and expression, has urged
“Thailand to hold broad-based public consultations to amend section 112 of the
penal code and the 2007 Computer Crimes Act so that they are in conformity with
the country’s international human rights obligations,” referring to the ICCPR.
Unmentioned, however, was the surprising array of ICCPR signatories that
apparently still maintain some kind of prohibition on insulting the monarch.
In Denmark, for example, defendants convicted under the
country’s libel laws receive double sentences for libeling the regent. According to David Streckfuss,
the author of Truth
on Trial in Thailand, it is also possible to receive sentences of up to
five years for lèse-majesté in Spain,
Norway, the Netherlands and Belgium. Streckfuss draws a number of distinctions
between Thailand and the European constitutional monarchies, noting that the
European monarchs nearly all swear an oath to their constitution. Still, he
acknowledges that both the Netherlands and Spain have used their laws recently,
resulting in fines or short jail terms for those found guilty.
For Thailand’s part, the country’s Constitutional Court,
sometimes associated with the royalist camp, ruled in October that Section
112 is a constitutional implementation of the 2007 Constitution, which places
the monarch in a position of “revered worship.” Given the attention lavished on
Thailand’s increasing application of its laws, one must wonder why these European
countries, often offered as paragons of free expression—and all signatories to
the ICCPR—have not encountered more resistance to the continued possibility of
punishment for this brand of speech.
No comments:
Post a Comment