Individual Speech
See also: Lèse majesté in ThailandAlthough freedom of speech was guaranteed by the 1997 Constitution, it was limited by several laws. The King may not be spoken ill of and lèse majesté laws are in force. In 1986, Deputy Interior Minister Veera Musikapong was convicted, imprisoned, and banned from politics for a campaign speech in which he noted that if he were born the Crown Prince, he "would be drinking whiskey instead of standing here getting pains in my knees."
The judgment of Thai courts may not be criticized. After a controversial ruling in July 2006 in which the Criminal Court jailed three Election Commissioners, the court worked with the police to identify 16 individuals who were captured on TV news footage criticizing the judgement. The Court later found all the individuals guilty and gave jail terms to 4 of them. The maximum jail sentence for the offense is seven years.
Furthermore, the use of defamation laws was frequently used to silence dissidents during the Thaksin administration, often by the Prime Minister himself. This led to a backlog in the courts of defamation suits and counter suits.
Read more about this topic: Censorship In Thailand
Famous quotes containing the words individual and/or speech:
“Self-determination has to mean that the leader is your individual gut, and heart, and mind or we’re talking about power, again, and its rather well-known impurities. Who is really going to care whether you live or die and who is going to know the most intimate motivation for your laughter and your tears is the only person to be trusted to speak for you and to decide what you will or will not do.”
—June Jordan (b. 1939)
“There is the old brute, too, the savage, the hairy man who dabbles his fingers in ropes of entrails; and gobbles and belches; whose speech is guttural, visceral—well, he is here. He squats in me.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)