Forever to blame the bearer of bad news as the bad news itself, those who don’t like to hear the truth, or at least a great speech about it and why it’s occasionally necessary to be told the truth, often resort to little tricks to as quickly as possible extinguish growing embers before they become searing flames burning up centuries of lies and deceit.

As he shuffled into the court room in central Thailand wearing leg chains that dragged across the wooden floor I saw the same warmth in the greeting that I had seen 30 years ago.  This was Somyot Pruksakasemsuk who was the first Thai person I ever met – at that time he had been organising Thai factory workers near Bangkok and I was arriving for a meeting of workers from throughout the Asia region.

Given the tremendous negative image and loss of reputation Thailand has engendered over the last five or six years arising from vigorous prosecution of lese majesté cases and cases under the Computer  Crime Act, it seems behooving to the state and government to at least clean up the lese majesté act so as to resemble, in international public opinion and in conformance with international agreements Thailand has already signed, a more civilized process.

It is recognized that human beings, regardless of origin or status, should have human dignity, liberty, and equality, and show reasonableness and tolerance toward differing opinions, and that in a democratic society, the right to freedom of expression is indispensable and any restriction of this freedom must be in proportion to necessity and not of a form that conflicts with the essence of this freedom.