Thai junta hits royal critics with record prison time

Just minutes after being locked up for 30 years for insulting Thailand’s monarchy, Pongsak Sriboonpeng described what he thought was the cause of his capture: a poorly chosen Facebook friend.

For at least a year, the self-described “red shirt” supporter of exiled former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra had posted angry commentary on the social networking site, including six postings that were later deemed to have defamed the royal family.

He had also made an online acquaintance: a young man who seemed to share his views, and who invited him to visit. So Pongsak took a bus to meet him.

As the bus idled at a station in the northern province of Phitsunalok on December 30, soldiers and police swarmed the vehicle and took him to a Bangkok Army base. Within days, Pongsak said, his Facebook friend emerged in the real world — among the officers interrogating him.

“He appeared and said, ‘Don’t you remember me ’” Pongsak told Reuters in early August, as he peered through the thick metal mesh of his holding cell beneath Bangkok’s military court.

Pongsak’s sentence — an initial 60 years, halved after he pleaded guilty — is the harshest of its kind recorded in the country’s history. It is part of a dramatic rise in arrests and convictions in Thailand for “lèse majesté,” or insulting the monarchy. The crackdown has been enabled by sweeping new powers the military granted itself after a May 2014 coup, and what government officials say is a junta-ordered campaign to more vigorously police online offences.

Many of the suspects arrested since the coup were detained without charge, held by the Army without access to lawyers and, in many cases, forced to hand over passwords to their online accounts, according to defence lawyers and a legal watchdog group monitoring these cases. Both Pongsak and a woman detained in a separate lèse majesté case said they were forced to reveal their passwords to their interrogators.

Military courts, which since the coup hear many lèse majesté cases, are handing down sentences of as many as 10 years for a single offence. When it comes to online platforms such as Facebook, multiple postings deemed critical of the monarchy can earn someone 10 years for each comment, served consecutively. That has led to record-breaking sentences.

Since the military takeover 15 months ago, 53 people have been investigated for royal insults, at least 40 of whom allegedly posted or shared comments online, according to iLaw, a Bangkok-based legal monitoring group. The majority of these cases have resulted in charges. In the seven years and five months prior, 75 people were investigated, 27 of them for online activity.

Reuters reviewed online postings for which two Thais pleaded guilty and were convicted of lèse majesté: six by Pongsak and five by another man who got 50 years for his comments. The postings included claims about the king and other members of the royal family that the court ruled to be false and defamatory. Some of the postings included profanity and ridicule. One posting was clearly false. Another was based on longstanding rumours.

None of the postings included threats of violence toward the monarchy or appeals to abolish it. Since the arrests of the two men, all of the postings deemed offensive by authorities have been taken down.

“The tempo of the arrests and prosecutions, and the severity of the sentences have gone up significantly,” said Sam Zarifi, regional director for Asia and the Pacific at the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), a Geneva-based human rights group. The 50-year and 60-year prison sentences were “egregious — there’s no other word for it,” Zarifi added. Although the military said these cases dealt with issues of national security, “they haven’t suggested there were threats of violence,” he said.

POLITICAL UNCERTAINTY

The targets of the law are increasingly ordinary people, many of them red-shirt supporters of Thaksin, rather than prominent individuals, said David Streckfuss, an independent academic in the Thai city of Khon Kaen who researches lèse majesté. In Thailand, the royalist establishment backed by the military has repeatedly tried to neutralise the political machine of Thaksin and his sister Yingluck, who were both elected Prime Minister with broad rural support, only to be toppled by military coups.

Critics of the junta say lèse majesté laws, often seen by the world as a quirk of Thai society, are being wielded by the generals as an instrument to crush dissent. Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha has repeatedly called for stronger prosecution of lèse majesté since taking power in a military coup in May last year.

The Army said it seized control to end a decade of sometimes violent political turmoil. Thaksin has frequently been accused by his opponents of seeking power at the expense of the revered monarchy, a charge he denies.

The health of 87-year-old King Bhumibol Adulyadej, who the palace recently said was treated for “water on the brain,” has added to the political uncertainty shrouding Thailand since the coup. So has a recent bombing in downtown Bangkok that killed 20 people and injured more than 100.

Major General Werachon Sukhondhapatipak, a spokesman for the government, said the administration of Yingluck Shinawatra had not properly pursued lèse majesté cases, which he called a “national security issue”.

Werachon would not say if the increased policing of lèse majesté cases was related to the political turmoil in Thailand, except for one allusion. “If someone wants to be number one in Thailand, you need to destroy the existing number one institution,” he said. Asked if he was referring to Thaksin, he said: “I’m not saying anyone, I did not say anyone. But if you want to be on the top of the list, be number one, you need to topple, you need to get rid of number one.”

Streckfuss said the more severe punishments being meted out in lèse majesté cases should be seen as a bid to shore up the power of the junta — and the traditionalist elite it represents — amid anxiety over the king’s health. “It’s trying to send the message that this is a taboo subject and that discussion of the monarchy will be punished at all costs,” he said.

‘LITTLE SCRUTINY’

The number of lèse majesté cases in Thailand has spiked during a period in which the military, which has staged a dozen successful coups since 1932, has enjoyed a level of control not seen in decades. Many lèse majesté arrests since the coup have been carried out under martial law, which was in place until April and allowed the Army to detain people for up to seven days without charging them, according to iLaw. The pace of lèse majesté arrests has slowed since martial law was revoked and they are now handled by police. But the focus has moved to the courts, where the pace of trials and convictions has picked up, iLaw said.

Article 44 of the junta’s interim constitution, a provision that was put in place after martial law ended, still allows for suspects to be detained for seven days without being charged, according to iLaw. For now, it is not being used for arrests, the organisation said.