So hats off to iLaw for giving Thais the chance to say what laws they want, and what they want scrapped. 

 

And are we surprised that in the first flush of enthusiasm, much of the discussion concerns the lèse majesté and cybercrime laws?

 

I should here make a disclosure. The director of Prachatai, Chiranuch Premchaiporn, is currently reporting at regular intervals to the Office of the Attorney-General while they make their minds up whether she should be prosecuted under the cybercrime law. 

 

She is also the person who reads this before you do. So if you are not at the moment reading this article, it’s her fault for censoring me in a valiant attempt to stay out of jail.

 

Now with respect to the lèse majesté law, there has been a great deal of discussion. The Minister of Justice, before he became Minister, wanted to extend the scope and up the penalties. The learned Dr Bowornsak, in a lengthy 3-day occupation of the Bangkok Post op-ed page, gave a sort of defence and sort of mooted some possible sort of changes. And the Dutch Ambassador responded by advising him to be careful if he thinks citation of European lèse majesté laws has any real relevance. 

 

And the blogs have been full of far less restrained comment. Including the ingenious idea of using one bizarre feature of the law to engineer its downfall. 

 

Translators and policemen from Bang Mod and English teachers with un-English names have been able to cause mayhem in the ranks of Bangkok’s press corps with legal broadsides against all and any, by exploiting the fact that, unlike defamation laws, where the defamed is the one bringing charges, you don’t have to be a majesté yourself to file an lèse majesté charge.

 

So, says one warped mind, why don’t we just charge everybody we can think of with lèse majesté? Clog up the police stations, swamp the courts, and give the Attorney-General a headache he won’t forget. When we are all accused, then no one is. 

 

This will, it is hoped, provoke somebody somewhere to re-think the way the law works and come up with some improvements

 

There is just one tiny fly in this ointment of irritation. The courts have heard cases where the lèse majesté accuser has become the accused and charged with malicious prosecution. And been found guilty and punished. 

 

So, attractive as it may seem, it may not be wise to lash out blindly at your favourite villains. You know, the security guard at Sukhumwit MRT station who always makes me open my bag; the woman who walks her poodle to poop in front of my gate; Volvo drivers; and the rest.

 

We should, at least in the early stages, have some justification for a lèse majesté charge, however tenuous. And in this, we are only following legal precedent. Khun Chiranuch, after all, did not write anything defamatory; she was merely the legal custodian of the website where someone else allegedly did. Her legal problems stem from not stopping them.

 

And in fact there may be many lèse majesté cases of a similar nature, where the accused is merely an accessory after the fact. Or during, or before. It’s hard to give a number when such cases can be held behind closed doors.

 

But let us take the fairly blatant case of Oliver Jufer, whose drunken spray-painting was so badly aimed that he’ll not be seeing Chiang Mai again in this lifetime. Jufer himself was fairly promptly charged, tried, convicted and pardoned.

 

However, Prachatai has reason to believe that lèse majesté charges have also been brought against the person who sold him the spray paint (for not recognizing the dangers of what he might use it for); against the owner of the portraits that Jufer defaced (for failing to remove them before they could be vandalized); against the local corner shop proprietors who sold him the Chang that got him so inebriated (for allowing the potential for graffiti that would not have existed had he not been drunk in charge of a spray-can); against Thai Beverage plc (for making Chang such a heady brew that it provokes even a sober-sided Swiss into drunken disparagement); against the bobby on the local beat (for being absent on a toilet break when his presence may have prevented disloyalty); against the airline that brought Jufer to Thailand (for failing to screen out republicans and prevent them boarding flights to Thailand); against Jufer’s doctor (for failing to diagnose his latent propensity for lèse majesté); and so on.

 

Charges against Jufer’s parents as the root cause of the entire problem have had to be dropped when the Swiss Embassy confirmed that under Swiss law, corpses cannot be exhumed in order to stand trial.