If You Travel To Thailand, Don't Talk About The King

An Australian author has been sentenced to three years in prison in Thailand after falling foul of a Thai law that makes it a crime to insult the country's royal family.

According to the CNN story, the author was arrested last August over a 2005 book which includes a paragraph about the king and crown prince that the authorities deemed a violation of the Lese Majeste law. Only 50 copies of the book (written in English) were printed, and only seven copies were sold. During the trial, the Thai government was not able to establish that any Thai national had even purchased the book.

As the author was escorted to court for his sentencing, he spoke to foreign journalists with tears in his eyes. "Truth is stranger than fiction," he said. "It's been an ordeal for months. It feels like a bad dream." The Thai Criminal Court originally sentenced Nicolaides to six years in jail but cut the punishment in half after he plead guilty. The author listened calmly as the verdict was translated to him. After hearing his verdict, he said: "I wish my family the best."

Western news sources have voluntarily self-censored themselves in shocking deference to the Thai government. In its article, CNN said that it chose not to repeat the allegations made by Australian author because it could result in CNN staff being prosecuted in Thailand.

After a lengthly search, the Daily Dude was able to find a copy of the book on the internet. The "offending" paragraph is reproduced below:

From King Rama to the Crown Prince, the nobility was renowned for their romantic entanglements and intrigues. The Crown Prince had many wives-- major and minor-- with a coterie of concubines for entertainment. One of his recent wives was exiled with her entire family, including a son they conceived together, for an undisclosed discretion. He subsequently remarried with another woman and fathered another child. It was rumoured that if the prince fell in love with one of his minor wives and she betrayed him, she and her family would disappear with their name, familial lineage and all vestiges of their existence expunged forever.

Lèse majesté is a weapon that has long been used to defend the perceived honour of Thailand’s royal family. Among several recent cases was a well-publicized December 2006 incident in which a man was charged with the offense after defacing images of the king in Chiang Mai during a drunken spree. He was held for four months without bail, and after a quick trial was sentenced to ten years in prison. Jufer served another few weeks before he was pardoned by the king and deported to his native Switzerland.

At the time, outrage about his draconian treatment for an act of immature vandalism led to even more outlandish attacks on the Thai monarchy. There was a flurry of provocative and childish online protests that used the global reach of the YouTube video-sharing website to mock the Thai royals. In response, the Thai government banned YouTube. This sparked further international bemusement and condemnation. To conform to local expectations of fair comment, YouTube is today only available in Thailand in filtered form.

Thailand is not the only country practicing this outrageous infringement on basic freedom of speech. Spain, Germany, Switzerland, Brunei, Kuwait and Poland all have laws against insulting heads of state.

In January 2005, Jerzy Urban was fined $6,000 by the Polish government for having insulted Pope John Paul II, a visiting head of state. The same month, 28 human rights activists were temporarily detained by the Polish authorities for allegedly insulting Vladimir Putin, a visiting head of state. In October 2006, a Polish man was arrested in Warsaw after expressing his dissatisfaction with the leadership of Lech and Jarosław Kaczyński by farting loudly.