Thai webmaster, Thanthawut Taweewarodomkul, was sentenced to 13 years in prison by a criminal court in Bangkok on 15 March in connection with material posted on the website, Nor Por Chor USA, in March 2010. Nor Por Chor USA is reportedly affiliated with the anti-government Red Shirt movement.

According to Thai police, three comments deemed offensive to Thailand’s royal family were posted on the website on 1 and 13 March 2010; two by a user named “admin” and one by another user. Furthermore, an IP address belonging to Thanthawut was connected with the website via an FTP connection, leading the authorities to believe that Thanthawut is the administrator of the website, the online news platform Prachatai.com reported.

Thanthawut was sentenced to 10 years in prison for violating Section 112 of the Criminal Code (“lèse majesté”) and an additional three years for violating the Thai Computer Crime Act (CCA). He was arrested on 1 April 2010 and has been held in jail ever since.

“IPI has often criticized Thailand’s lèse majesté law and the way in which authorities have abused it to silence criticism of the royal family,” said IPI Director Alison Bethel McKenzie. “This law violates Thailand’s constitutional principles and the universal right to freedom of expression and should be repealed.”

Thailand’s lèse majesté law is among the harshest in the world. Article 112 of the Penal Code states: “Whoever defames, insults or threatens the King, Queen, the Heir-apparent or the Regent, shall be punished with imprisonment of three to fifteen years.” Complaints of lèse majesté can be filed by anybody and are often abused by state authorities and other individuals to defy their political opponents.

Following the anti-government protests that erupted in Thailand in March 2010, Thai army chief General Prayuth Chan-ocha announced a series of arrests under the lèse majesté law.

In 2009, the entire board of the Foreign Correspondent’s Club of Thailand (FCCT) – including the BBC’s Bangkok correspondent Jonathan Head and two other British nationals, three American nationals, including two working for Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal, an Australian national, and a Thai news reader for Channel 3 – was reportedly accused of lèse majesté because the club had approved the sale of a DVD that contained a controversial speech.

In 2008, Thai authorities filed charges of lèse majesté against Jonathan Head on three separate occasions, one of them in connection with a story on the BBC website, not written by Head, which did not place the photograph of the king at the top of the page, as is considered essential by the authorities in Thailand.

Australian writer, Harry Nicolaides spent six months in a Thai prison after receiving a three-year sentence for lèse majesté in 2008 in connection with a passage in his 2005 self-published novel, “Verisimilitude. Is the truth, the truth?”, which reportedly sold seven copies. He received a royal pardon and returned to Melbourne on 21 February 2009.

The Computer Crime Act, passed by Thailand’s military government in 2007, has been strongly criticized by journalists and press freedom groups as it foresees prison terms of up to five years for publishing forged or false content that endangers individuals, the public, or national security.