Thai editor Somyot Prueksakasemsuk may no longer be at the helm of his bygone political magazine, a sharp tongue that mocked a former government. But no matter what the circumstances, Somyot stays true to his love for words. He now works as a librarian in, well, a Thai prison.

Thai editor Somyot Prueksakasemsuk was sentenced to 11 years in prison late last month.

Somyot has languished for 22 months in jail over accusations of defamation and Lèse majesté, or defaming the monarchy. He was detained in April 2011, denied bail, and late last month was sentenced to 11 years imprisonment. “He has his hopes high,” said his wife, Sukunya “Joop” Prueksakasemsuk. “He was depressed for two weeks after the sentencing. But we’re going to appeal, even if it takes many years.”

Her husband’s crime? At the height of Thailand’s political crisis in 2010, Somyot published two articles in Voice of Taksin, a defunct political magazine named after the former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who was overthrown in a 2006 military coup and now lives in self-imposed exile. The magazine passed off the writing as slapstick fiction. But the court retorted that the satire was a thinly veiled attack on the king, Bhumibol Adulyadej, who the main character resembled.

There’s another twist: Somyot didn’t actually write the articles that led to his imprisonment.

The real author, Jakrapob Penkair, is a fugitive in Cambodia who put together the pieces under a pseudonym. A former minister under Thaksin, Jakrapob is a founding member the United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship (UDD), a movement more commonly known as the “Red Shirts.” Calling for Thaksin’s return to Thailand, the protestors confronted soldiers in May 2010, sparking a political crisis that left 91 people dead.

A little background: Thaksin supporters claimed the ex-premier, who served from 2001 to 2006, was a democratically elected populist. His opponents, known as the “Yellow Shirts”, say he was a gangster whose strongman tactics overrode checks and balances and threatened the primacy of the king. Many of the Yellows are from Bangkok, representing a middle class that, in a drift away from what the West would expect, has turned against the idea of representative government, the journalist Joshua Kurlantzick argues in Democracy in Retreat.

It’s a trend that reveals much, in this once-promising democracy, about the increase in censorship using lèse majesté laws. More than 400 cases have been brought forward between 2006 and 2011. The rules shield the country’s monarchy from scrutiny and are used to jail government critics in general, thanks in part to the vagueness laid out in article 112 of the Thai criminal code: “Whoever defames, insults or threatens the King, Queen, the Heir-apparent or the Regent, shall be punished with imprisonment of three to fifteen years.”

What makes the law dangerous is that anybody can file a complaint against anybody. Authorities then investigate and decide whether or not to press charges using the hazy definition of “insult.”

“Everybody is afraid of crossing the line, but nobody knows where the line is,” said Andrew MacGregor Marshall, a former Thomson Reuters journalist in Thailand, now living in Singapore because of his controversial writings on Lèse majesté. (No criminal complaint has been filed against Marshall in Thailand yet, to his knowledge.) “The law is being used by a great many people for a great many reasons.”

It’s an open secret that members of the royal family, including Queen Sirikit, actively peddle patronage amid the country’s political networks. That factionalism and political jockeying means neither end of the political spectrum is immune from Lèse majesté accusations. At the same time, both sides claim to be acting in the interests of the king. Many Thais perceive him as an untouchable figurehead whose on-paper support is needed, for the most part, to get things done in the Thai political scene. Publicly oppose that perception, and arrest is a possibility.

As Somyot’s case demonstrates, judges are not just handing sentences to critics themselves, but to people who simply allow others to criticise. He’s not the first editor to be targeted in this way. In May 2012, the same judge presiding over Somyot’s case found Chiranuch Premchaipoen — more popularly known as “Jiew” — guilty of violations of the 2007 Computer Crimes Act. She was lucky in one respect: getting away with a rather lenient, suspended eight-month sentence.

Police claimed that as editor of the news website Prachatai, she wasn’t quick enough to remove 10 comments posted by others that were critical of the monarchy. “It’s a climate of fear,” she said in reference to both Somyot’s case and her own. “A professional editor can be held accountable even if he didn’t do anything.”

Then there’s “Uncle SMS,” real name Amphon Tangnoppaku, who’s become a sort of martyr for the anti-Lèse majesté movement. In May 2012, the 61-year-old died of natural causes in prison after being sentenced to 20 years in prison for insulting Queen Sirikit. Accusers claimed the grandfather sent four anti-royal text messages to a government official, but he maintained that he didn’t even know how to send a text message.

It is a reality that Joe Gordon, an American citizen of Thai ethnicity, looks at with disdain. In 2011, Gordon was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison for posting excerpts on a blog from a widely available biography of the king. In July 2012, the king pardoned him, a luxury afforded to foreign nationals but rarely given to Thais.

“The prison conditions were horrible,” he told Index from Los Angeles, recalling the time he shared in a prison cell with Somyot. “And I can tell you Somyot was not a criminal. He spent time writing every day, working in the library. He was always helping other people.”

It is a reputation of kindness that Somyot’s wife takes pride in, looking to her husband as merely one trying to help many. “Looking at my husband’s conviction, it’s not individual anymore,” she says. “It shows we, everybody, don’t have freedom of speech or publishing, and no real freedom or democracy.”

Geoffrey Cain is an editor at New Mandala, the Southeast Asia blog at the Australian National University

The post Where insulting royalty will put you in jail appeared first on Index on Censorship.

In Vietnam, protests have boiled to a level unprecedented since the start of this decade.  Last month, the fight for free expression hit an unexpected climax. The mother of imprisoned blogger Dang Thi Kim Lieng killed herself in a self-immolation, protesting her daughter’s upcoming trial and sending an uneasy hush over the government. The hearings were supposed to commence on 7 August — a full four years after the blogger was first detained — but since the suicide the trial has been delayed indefinitely.

But this was merely the latest paroxysm in a state-led retaliation against freedom of speech that picked up in mid-2008. With demonstrations flaring up over land disputes and against Chinese naval aggression in the South China Sea, the Communist Party has been striking back against dissidents on the streets and online.

Bloggers have been the primary target, as the state tries to prevent them spreading videos of police brutality, writing critical articles and promoting demonstrations on their websites. As of this year, at least 17 Vietnamese bloggers are behind bars, according to Human Rights Watch. That makes Vietnam the second-worst jailer of netizens after China. Many of them have been imprisoned for writing about topics the government deems sensitive, such as land grabs by local property developers and the South China Sea dispute.

“They say every writer has scissors in the back of his mind,” one pro-democracy blogger told me, who asked not to be named. “You never know when the party will strike to make an example of you.”

What’s prompted the swift backlash against free speech? In the 1990s and early 2000s, Vietnam’s market reforms were enriching people from outside the traditional power center of Hanoi, a development that bolstered all sorts of new and critical voices under the one-party banner. The Communist Party wanted to keep the trend going as proof that it was cleaning up its act before joining the World Trade Organisation in 2007. Leaders declared that corruption, in particular, was a plague that could hold back the economy, and tasked its journalists and writers with uncovering malfeasance in the government and business.

As a result, the country witnessed a blossoming of print investigative journalism that led to the arrests of gangsters and and corrupt government officials, and by the mid-2000s a nascent blogging movement. In a nation where all newspapers remained fully or partially government-owned, the growth of the internet meant that the flow of information was increasingly out of reach from members of the Politburo, the party’s all-powerful body that sets the country’s direction. The crackdowns, of course, haven’t stopped Vietnam’s boisterous bloggers and journalists, and not all of them end up in trouble — unless they touch on topics related to high-level politics.

Even though Vietnam’s 1992 Constitution guarantees freedom of speech, writers and bloggers eventually took their role as the “fourth estate” too far for the tastes of the Party. They encountered a sharp reversal after the PMU-18 scandal of 2006, when journalists and bloggers revealed that officials in the Ministry of Transport were gambling away millions of dollars in donor aid. In 2008, two prominent reporters were imprisoned for two years for their writing. The Party’s strike back was also prompted by a growing pro-democracy movement in the mid-2000s, when hundreds of brave Vietnamese signed a multi-party manifesto circulated online. Since then, any hopes for political dissent in the blogosphere or in print have been thwarted.

Vietnam expert Carl Thayer notes that the rise of To Huy Rua, a socialist ideologue who acts as an interlocutor with the Chinese Communist Party, has coincided with stronger measures targeting against intellectuals and dissidents. (His assertion is backed by the American cables unveiled by Wikileaks.) Rua heads the party’s information commission, giving him sway over issues of ideology and public discourse.

Historically, free-thought crackdowns pick up around the time the Communist Party holds its congresses every five years, when factions fight over the new leaders and they want information tightly controlled. The latest restrictions are unusual because, despite intermittent relaxations since the mid-2000s, the government has pretty much kept up the pace. In June, officials unveiled a draft of the new Internet Decree, which would require bloggers to publish their contact information online. It’s not yet clear when the bill will be passed.

The move is one more attempt to rein in all those new voices in Vietnamese politics who have garnered enough clout to contest one-party rule. And as those leaders try to reassert control over which criticisms are acceptable, they’re facing even more of a pushback from the writers and bloggers who are promulgating the protests and dissent.

Geoffrey Cain, a freelance journalist, has covered Asia for Time, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, and Foreign Policy. He is an editor at the New Mandala, the Southeast Asia blog at the Australian National University. He tweets at @geoffrey_cain

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